10 advantages of using voice technology for regulatory compliance

Discover 10 advantages of using voice technology for regulatory compliance and how it can help to protect your business and customers.

Why is regulatory compliance important to contact centers?

Organizations throughout the world face new and existing complex regulations and top of their board agenda is governance, risk and compliance (GRC). The importance of GRC means the pressure is growing all the time to understand, manage and protect customers’ data and one of the most challenging sources is voice.

In 2019, The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued almost £400 million worth of fines in the UK for compliance, legal and governance-related issues. Fines, however, are just the tip of the iceberg for companies operating non-compliant businesses. The effects on brand reputation and share price can be far more detrimental.

The importance of GRC and the exponential growth of content means businesses must look at introducing technology to help comply with their governance policies and adhering to them to protect their brand and avoid fines. It is one aspect to define the policies and another to ensure that they are implemented and complied with.

Financial services regulations to consider

The number of financial regulations is growing, and financial organizations face enormous pressure to understand, implement and monitor the policies and processes these regulations require to ensure they remain compliant with both old and new legislation.

The following are some of the industry regulations most often breached by financial institutions:

• Know your customer (KYC) is a regulation to verify the identities of your customers, clients and suppliers. Financial institutions use KYC to protect themselves against being exploited by criminals involved in fraud such as money laundering, as well as illegal activity such as financing terrorism.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been utilized as part of customer onboarding processes to ensure that all the relevant advice has been provided and that all the essential information has been requested and received. This quality assurance process is becoming a vital part of the monitoring and supervision of many financial organizations.

• Anti-money laundering (AML) is intended to prevent criminals from disguising illegally obtained funds as legitimate income. AML regulations require banks and financial institutions to monitor their customers’ transactions and report on suspicious financial activity. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information and data from individuals who live in the European Union (EU). GDPR lays out the principles for data management and the rights of an individual, while also imposing fines that can be revenue-based.

A large proportion of voice calls have personal information, identifying which of those calls may or may not have pertinent information aids with the retention strategies of many organizations and ensure adherence with GDPR.

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an information security standard for businesses that transact via credit card. PCI DSS compliance is not about the necessary removal of personal data from the records but ensuring they remain safe and secure.

• Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) is a legislative framework instituted by the EU to regulate financial markets. The MiFID II legislation requires organizations to increase the transparency of costs and improve record-keeping of transactions.

MiFID II specifically calls out the requirement to retain all records including telephone conversations. The requirement to capture, preserve, monitor and discover against these calls becomes the burden of the organization. Therefore, the ability to understand the calls and easily search across them becomes a “must-have”.

How regulatory technology can help with compliance

According to KPMG, regulatory technology (RegTech) is expected to make up 34% of all regulatory spending by the end of 2020.

RegTech generally includes any compliance technology or software created to address regulatory challenges and help companies understand regulatory requirements and stay compliant. The elements within it include:

• Compliance and risk management

• Identity management

• Regulatory reporting

• Fraud management

• Regulatory intelligence

The use of compliance technology for information gathering, monitoring, process automation, workflow automation, and advanced analytics is enabling the digital transformation of compliance and risk management functions.

RegTech helps reduce the overall cost of delivering compliance.

How voice technology underpins improved regulatory compliance

Compliance is a significant and growing challenge due to the volume of customer interactions each day. Organizations are required to make all call records accessible upon request by both regulators and customers. This means in-depth record-keeping is necessary.

As voice is such an extensively used channel, voice technology is a key component of RegTech software. It is challenging and time consuming to extract useful information from audio recordings – often requiring large teams of people to manually listen to calls.

By transforming voice recordings into text through transcription, voice technology enables 100% of pertinent customer call records to be automatically stored and indexed. They can then be accessed and searched for by relevant keywords or phrases.

10 ways to improve regulatory compliance using voice technology

To ensure that organizations comply with the governance policies, compliance teams monitor/supervise data to ensure that any infringements are identified and addressed quickly. Text-based data sources – such as transactional systems, email and chat – can easily normalize and apply intelligence across them as part of their monitoring.

Voice, however, is a challenge and often organizations use small-scale sampling of calls which only addresses around 3-5% of the voice files. This leaves financial services businesses and other organizations that deal with sensitive data incredibly exposed – with a data blind spot of over 95%.

Voice technology improves efficiency when it comes to monitoring compliance in real-time, as well as speeding up investigations with accessible customer records.

Download Speechmatics’ Smart Guide to discover 10 ways using voice technology for regulatory compliance can protect your customers and business.

1. Reduce fines

2. Speed up investigations

3. Improve information culling

4. Protect your brand

5. Share price security

6. Reduce false positives / errors

7. Increase keyword spotting activity

8. Make policies / processes more efficient

9. 360 view of the customer

10. Streamline workflows

A guide to how using voice technology for regulatory compliance can protect your customers and business

Conclusion: How voice technology can protect your business

The importance of compliance means RegTech is becoming more widespread to enable organizations to monitor processes, remain compliant and mitigate risk. Voice technology is a key aspect of RegTech – helping businesses remain compliant by transforming voice data into text which can then be monitored and analyzed by analytics systems.