Achieving Compliance in Finance Through Best-in-Class Speech-to-Text

It’s a demanding time for the financial sector. Banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms all face new and existing regulations to protect themselves and their customers from financial fraud and crime. These onerous regulations are extremely complex, and non-compliance can result in reputational damage and huge regulatory fines. In the UK alone, the Financial Conduct Authority levied over £567million of fines in 2021 related to breaches including money laundering, financial crime, and bribery.

The MiFID II directive, for example, requires that all communication pertaining to a financial trade or transaction, needs to be retained for a period of five years with firms required to conduct surveillance of their employees’ communications to ensure they’re compliant with market rules.

So how do companies effectively monitor all of their customer calls, video conferences, face-to-face meetings and trading room communications? The answer is to use speech-to-text transcription to produce usable and searchable speech data to deliver risk and scenario-based insights, and flag any compliance issues.

The Importance of Accuracy

Accurate and effective speech-to-text can help organizations meet their regulatory compliance goals by automatically understanding and transcribing voice recordings or live conversations at scale. This automated approach ensures all interactions are monitored (not just a sample), often across a large set of global languages, thereby reducing manual staffing costs, increasing operational effectiveness, and reducing errors.

Transcription accuracy is of paramount importance to maintain confidence in compliance solutions. For example, here are two transcriptions from the same financial call:

The first example shows how poor transcription accuracy can result in an unreadable, confusing and false record. In the second example, the call is transcribed correctly with the correct financial jargon and can be used confidently for analysis and accurate record-keeping. In a global market, this needs to be done for a host of languages.

Speechmatics speech-to-text uses machine learning to transcribe human-level speech into text in real-time, regardless of demographic, gender, dialect or location. With 50 languages and counting, Speechmatics offers language cover for over half of the world’s population, including countries in the APAC region, expected to be the largest sector for Compliance software up to 2026.

Finding the Right Phrases

Until recently, the nuances of financial jargon and finance-specific terms have prevented the financial services industry from taking advantage of what speech technology can offer. After all, if their voices can’t be understood by speech-to-text, how can they be sure of regulatory compliance? The solution is Speechmatics’ very own Financial Language Pack.

This language pack is specific to the finance industry and built for use cases including compliance, fraud identification, analytics, financial news and earnings calls. As the world’s most accurate and inclusive speech-to-text engine, we can now identify finance usage in conversation, helping to avoid confusion with abbreviations, acronyms (such as FX, SEC or GAAP) and finance-specific terms. Our Custom Dictionary feature also improves discoverability of unique terms to make sure you’re identifying the right terminology.

On top of this, our Entity Formatting feature, correctly formats numbers, dates, and currency and language-specific punctuation including commas, question marks, and exclamation marks to improve readability and to understand context.

With the option of on-premises and SaaS deployment models, we can also ensure organizations are able to use accurate speech data to not just improve customer experiences, but to meet their regulatory obligations too. Wherever and whenever they need it.

Make the Right Move Today

At Speechmatics, we believe accurate speech-to-text is the route to building robust Compliance solutions, especially in the financial sector. Which is why we deliver best-in-class automatic speech-to-text at scale and at a low cost in as many languages as possible. Get in touch to learn how you can differentiate your Compliance solution and find out why we recently won the FinTech Innovator of the Year award at the UK Business Tech Awards.

Ian Sherring – Senior Account Executive, Financial Services and Compliance

Book a meeting with a Compliance specialist and we’ll give you the tools you need to differentiate in market and help you deliver on constantly evolving customer expectations.