The benefits of using voice technology to support your corporate governance

Read the benefits that businesses are getting from using voice technology to support their corporate governance strategies.

Corporate governance in today's economic landscape

In recent times, regulators have been highlighting the risks associated with the pandemic and the need for effective surveillance solutions to ensure that misadventure/rogue behavior is identified and appropriate action taken.

For example, in the course of the crisis, over 3.4 million people took payment deferrals on mortgages and other credit products, some of whom may struggle to repay. Other consumers, with money to invest, may be enticed by promises of higher returns in a low interest rate environment and may be prompted to invest money they cannot afford to lose on risky, highly leveraged, speculative and/or illiquid assets. Others may fall victim to scams and fraud.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reported its fines for 2020. Although not the largest in total value, one of the highest was for poor handling of mortgages by several large UK lenders.

In addition, in the US, CFTC reported their annual enforcement and compliance results which included charges involving manipulation, spoofing and unlawful use of customer funds. The CFTC confirmed that they aggressively pursued fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when victims were vulnerable, and they have filed 29 associated cases since March 13.

It is clear that the pandemic has caused a lot of unrest for regulators, and pressures to remain compliant continue to grow. With increased regulations and a growing amount of unstructured content created as an indirect result of the pandemic, it has never been more important for businesses to take their corporate governance strategies into their own hands.

Harnessing automation technologies for eDiscovery

The influx of remote data means the core electronic discovery (eDiscovery) task of processing and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) needs to continue to evolve in step to maintain the highest levels of data scrutiny while remaining efficient and cost-effective.

While the legal industry might be perceived to lag behind in terms of technology adoption, the changing paradigm of how businesses operate in a COVID and post-COVID world is putting increased pressure on traditional eDiscovery mechanisms. It has never been a better time to harness increasingly mature and well-adopted mechanisms like automatic speech recognition (ASR).

The amount of audio and video data is increasing

The amount of audio and video data created has increased as interactions are moving online facilitated through conferencing and collaboration tools to maintain communication while the workforce engages remotely.

Businesses need to understand and adapt to this changing market landscape and ensure their corporate governance strategies are appropriate for the new ways that data is created, stored and shared. For this reason, surveillance/monitoring and investigation tools must be robust, leveraging the right tools to not only capture but transform data into a format that enables voice to be monitored, searched and evaluated at scale for both internal and external interactions.

Using voice technology for audio eDiscovery

The adoption of automation technologies like ASR makes it possible to understand voice data in any channel at scale by transforming it into a unified text-based format which can be monitored in real-time and easily searched for future use. Advancements in machine learning have seen a significant increase in the accuracy of ASR. Additional capabilities like punctuation and tagging of specific word types like profanity expose greater granularity and understanding of interactions as part of the early case assessment process.

Working with Speechmatics directly or through an eDiscovery partner enables organizations to enhance the productivity of their eDiscovery workflows to support businesses in improving their reviews no matter its channel or source.

Why audio eDiscovery is important to an organization

eDiscovery tools are a vital part of any organization’s legal processes – to ensure it can provide the right information, as quickly as possible, if it faces legal action. Historically, the discovery of information focused on documentation, text, emails and other text-based content. However, this list has grown to include more digital media formats like audio and video.

The process of understanding, sorting and culling data can be accelerated with eDiscovery tools –increasing productivity, speeding up resolutions, and helping mitigate risks all while reducing costs. Having as much information as possible around each piece of content ready for investigation delivers a much better outcome.

Although this is particularly relevant to organizations regulated by the FCA and other governing bodies, compliance and subsequent eDiscovery is also critical for non-regulated companies to achieve good corporate governance.

How voice technology supports corporate governance

Rand Corporation has discovered that 73% of all eDiscovery costs come from documentation review, 8% from collection, and 19% from processing. It says that although humans are required in these stages of the discovery process, the human approach is inconsistent and prone to errors.

Using automated technologies for the eDiscovery process saves time and money while reducing inconsistencies, missed data and errors. Voice technology, for example, is a crucial tool to ensure voice data is accurately transcribed into text for the review and analysis components of an investigation. Without it, surfacing vital data stored in voice recordings, videos or audio files would be an extremely laborious and costly process.

Voice technology enables rapid, intelligent discovery of audio and video files. Once transformed into text, voice data can be easily analyzed. Keyword spotting can be used to search transcripts for a specific reason as to why a business is being investigated. If it’s for mis-selling insurance, for example, transcripts can be searched for scenarios when insurance was sold.

Conclusion: Voice technology is an essential component of your corporate governance strategy

The ability to capture, process and review all data transiting your organization is essential to achieve good corporate governance.

From gaining a 360-degree view of events and incidents to speeding up data culling, cost efficiency and data security, voice technology offers many ways for organizations to achieve good corporate governance through audio eDiscovery.

The benefits of adopting and integrating any-context speech recognition technology is no longer a question of choice but an essential piece of technology to include in your corporate governance strategy.

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