5 Use Cases for ASR in FinTech

We’ve just returned from London and the FinTech World Forum 2022, where we gave a talk to the delegates about intriguing, interesting, and inspiring ideas surrounding ASR in FinTech. The crux of this speech was about the wide-ranging use cases voice technology can help with in the FinTech market.

In a recent study, research firm Marqual IT solutions expects the Market Share of speech-to-text technology to reach $5.8bn in 2027. Of that, the largest segment was Banking & Finance. One of the main questions we're asked when we talk to the FinTech sector is, “How can ASR help my business?” To help answer this, here are five use cases where we think you’ll see ROI.

#1 ASR for Contact Centers

We know analyzing voice data helps contact centers unlock new meaning and value from customer interactions at scale. While previously only 3% of call data was evaluated, voice technology makes it easy to archive and evaluate 100% of customer interactions.

As reported in CXToday, 40% of contact centers said that they were able to boost productivity by anticipating the purpose of each call, enabling agents to handle more interactions within a similar period of time. Only 2% of those asked said they found no clear benefits from speech analytics.

#2 Voice Assistants

The proliferation of voice assistants shows no signs of abating. Alexa, Siri and others are quickly becoming as a part of our daily routines as our kettles and toasters. What does this mean for FinTech? According to a report by FinTech Global, voice assistant-powered e-commerce transaction values are expected to reach 19.4bn by 2023, an increase from just $4.6bn in 2021.

With a recorded 5.22 billion unique mobile users, making up 66.6% of the global population, it stands to reason that the number of people using voice to bank will only continue to increase.

#3 RegTech and Compliance

Effective monitoring and supervision, fraud detection, complying with the Unfair Deceptive Acts of Practices (UDAP); these are just some of the challenges those in Finance have to be vigilant about every single day of the week. It wasn’t long ago that Goldman Sachs were fined $1m by the CFTC after they failed to obtain and retain recordings of certain phone lines on sales and trading desk.

Compliance is, and always will be, a hot-button issue for banks or all shapes and sizes. Accurate and affective speech recognition technology helps deliver monitoring at scale, thus protecting business and institutions from both reputational damage and regulatory fines.

#4 Rich Media

The need for superior compliance bleeds into other areas too, especially interactive digital media. In the first quarter of 2022 the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) had to intervene to amend or withdraw 84 promotions. 76% of these involved websites or social media. As to the rules concerning accessibility when it comes to subtitles and captioning, ASR is vital to protecting those putting content online.

Conversely, is the financial sector making the most of the social media content on offer? Is it understanding what’s being said online? Great ASR can help mine that wealth of data.

#5 Employee Productivity

The pandemic accelerated the number of online meetings we have globally. Using ASR brings the opportunity to summarize meetings automatically. We can gain insights about our employees and help them, when and where they need it. Whether that’s working remotely at home, or in the office.

When it comes to Unified Communications (UC), ASR is again well placed to help. With UC Today saying this particular environment is growing at a rate of 18.7% CAGR, there’s a great opportunity to enhance availability, scalability, and collaboration in the financial ecosystem.

Why Speechmatics?

Once those in FinTech can see how ASR can benefit their business and bring a return in their investment, the next question I’m always asked is, “Why Speechmatics?”. My go-to answer has always been to highlight our ability to support everyone’s voice to a high level of accuracy which are top of the class, beating competitors like Microsoft and Google to name but two. Now, however, there’s so much more we offer those in finance, on top of being the most accurate. One part we’re hugely proud of, is we recently added Entity Formatting to our additional features.

Our new Entity Formatting comes in two modes: written and spoken. Written will provide a clear, formatted transcript that’s easiest to read (e.g. 5th of January 2022, £10million), meaning anyone can glean the information they need quickly and accurately. The latter will replicate the words as they are spoken (e.g. fifth of January two thousand and two, ten million pounds), a tool more beneficial for compliance, or where interfacing with third-party systems. The difference it makes to the readability of the conversation is staggering.

The tools for FinTech solutions are out there, but are you leveraging the richest form of data, the “spoken word”, to deliver valuable insights and outcomes to your best capabilities? If you’re in the FinTech world, looking for ASR answers, give us a test today.