Compliance breaches can have a detrimental impact on revenues, reputation, customer loyalty and can ultimately drive down share prices.

The high price companies pay for compliance breaches

Severe cyber hacks and data breaches impose a permanent cost of 1.8% of a company's value, according to a report by CGI and Oxford Economics. That's a hit of approximately £120 million for the average firm in London’s FTSE index – and, in some cases, breaches have taken as much as 15% off an affected company’s valuation.

In the first nine months of 2019 alone, 5,183 breaches were reported – exposing more than 7.9 billion compromised records – a Risk-Based Security research report has revealed. This figure was up by a third on the previous year and the total number of records exposed more than doubled.

Why voice technology has a key role to play in compliance

Publicly traded companies must adopt regulatory programs and have auditable finances. To go public, an organization must have revenues of $10-$20 million per year, with profits of around $1 million. Management teams should also show future growth rates of about 25% per year over five to seven years.

As well as having a detrimental effect on an organization’s share price, compliance breaches impact revenues, reputation, and customer loyalty – and ultimately lead to customer churn. This means boards are motivated to add automation to their workflows and technology stacks to monitor compliance and mitigate risk.

Incorporating automatic speech recognition (ASR) into the technology stack to enable the use of other regulatory technology (RegTech) solutions is paramount to the success of these tools. Without accurate speech technology at the core of voice data transcription, analysis and monitoring become ineffective.

How voice technology helps guard against compliance breaches

Voice data is notoriously difficult to transcribe and analyze accurately. However, the latest developments in ASR are enabling organizations to include it as a core part of their workflow and technology stack. Voice technology enables businesses to transform all voice data into text, which can be combined with data obtained from other channels to create a joined-up data center.

By converting call recordings into text, all voice interactions with a business can be tracked to ensure the organization is complying with the 300+ pages of regulations companies face. Compliance managers can easily search for regulatory keywords and go straight to that moment in a call to determine whether they are being compliant.

Having the right processes in place – and the ability to be transparent with RegTech tools, processes and conformity to compliance – is essential for brand reputation and share price security.

Conclusion: Voice technology helps avoid compliance breaches and their impact on share price

With the right RegTech solutions in place – 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. The value of adopting and integrating ASR technology is no longer a question of choice for financial institutions, banks and other organizations.

Using voice technology for regulatory compliance is delivering supervision and monitoring at scale while delivering a better service and protecting the customer. Organizations can minimize fines – and protect their customers and business reputation.