Blog - Use Cases

Jul 22, 2020 | Read time 4 min

Protect your business from compliance-related fines using voice technology

Financial services companies are adopting voice technology for compliance monitoring to protect their business against fines and damaged reputations.

Why your business should care about compliance

Since 2008, global financial institutions have been fined more than $36 billion for non-compliance. With more regulations being added every year, banks, financial services and other organizations that deal with personal or sensitive information face increasingly large barriers in the delivery of their products or services.

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Increased regulation means organizations must conform to standards.

Continue to implement new systems and solutions to manage risk to their customers’ personal data. Anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC) and sanctions regulations led to approximately $10 billion of fines being issued in 2019 alone.

Businesses must look at introducing new technologies and automated compliance monitoring to help reduce compliance fines and protect their brands.

Fines cost reputation as well as money

Failure to observe financial regulations can be costly for organizations in more ways than one. Fines are just the tip of the iceberg – reputational damage can have even more impact on a brand.

If an organization faces a regulation breach, it runs the risk of distancing potential new customers and encourages customer churn. Brand reputation is paramount to year-on-year business growth. This makes protecting a brand one of the most important challenges that businesses face when presented with compliance fines.

Consumers need to trust the organizations they deal with. But negative publicity can undo a brand’s reputation in minutes – ultimately affecting company revenues.

How voice technology can protect your business: Reducing compliance fines

Organizations are required to make all call records accessible upon request by both regulators and customers. This means in-depth record-keeping and compliance monitoring is essential. But extracting information from voice data in audio recordings is challenging and time-consuming, requiring large teams of people to manually listen to calls.

Using voice technology for call transcription as part of your regulatory technology (RegTech) stack makes compliance-related issues visible so organizations can identify and avoid breaches.

Research conducted in 2019 by a prominent contact center solution provider found that 91% of respondents believed increasing investment in contact center compliance software should be considered a priority in the next year. And 83% of contact center professionals said their organization’s efforts towards customer privacy and private data safety needed to be improved.

Voice technology provides significant efficiency. It enables organizations to monitor compliance in real-time using automated compliance monitoring and speeds-up investigations with accessible customer records.

How voice technology underpins RegTech software

Unstructured voice data can contain many breaches without a brand knowing they exist, only for them to be uncovered by an auditor or regulator. Accurately transcribing call data into text enables organizations to analyze or monitor calls in real-time as well as after the calls have happened. This kind of compliance monitoring gives organizations the chance to protect their brand by taking action before any negative publicity can put it at risk. This is especially prevalent for GDPR instances where compliance breaches must be reported within 72 hours of its occurrence.

Using voice technology to transcribe calls into text also enables all customer call records to be stored, indexed and flagged automatically. They can then be accessed and searched for by relevant keywords or phrases. In this way, the heavy lifting is automated – leaving just the review process to be actioned by human members of the team to understand the causes of issues and ensure they don’t happen again.

Conclusion: Voice technology protects your business from compliance-related fines

Effective and accurate capturing of data across all communication channels is essential to ensure compliance with changing regulations. Voice data is notoriously difficult to transcribe and analyze accurately. However, developments in automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology are enabling organizations to include it as a core part of their automated compliance monitoring

With the right RegTech solutions – of which ASR forms a pivotal part by capturing voice – society, consumers, investors and regulatory bodies can be reassured that their personal and sensitive data is secure.

Adopting and integrating voice technology for compliance monitoring is no longer a question of choice for financial institutions, banks and other organizations – it is crucial to protect your business from compliance-related fines.

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