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The value of making audio archives fully searchable

The value of making audio archives fully searchableOver 2600 financial services companies in the UK have cost implications connected with the need to observe PCI DSS, the forthcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive second version (MiFID II), and other regulatory provisions. Scanning the horizon for new solutions and disruptive technologies that can make a meaningful contribution to optimizing the compliance costs is, therefore, part of the job description for a fairly large cohort of executives in the financial sector.

Why is this attention fully justified? Let us take a look at the repercussions of MiFID II in some more detail. MiFID II comes into effect on 3 January 2018. It will aim to update and improve the way the capital markets function, strengthen the transparency of trading & the level of protection in wholesale and retail business environments.

The FCA have proposed (via a press release here) that financial advisers (in addition to certain regulated counterparties where trading room conversations are routinely recorded) will require to have telephone conversations with clients recorded and stored with the aim of providing easy resolution to disputes between member firms and their clients. It is expected that calls will need to be stored for, at least, three years and that call data should be easily accessible.

One of the best conceivable answers to this regulatory challenge is ensuring that customer conversation recordings in audio archives are fully searchable. Another important consideration is that all the new conversations will need to be indexed in real time to provide for easy search and retrieval, in both manual and automatic modes.

Contact centre solutions presently in use in the UK do not allow comprehensive search by keyword or key phrase. The indexing is there, but in practice it would only deliver rather large chunks of conversations that will have to be actually listened to by a human being to determine relevance and to precisely identify the issue in question.

Solutions delivering bulk archiving, indexing and keyword/key phrase searching should be well received by the market and be of interest to many financial intermediaries (e.g. interdealer brokers) in addition to banks and financial advisors.

Spitch AG – a Swiss company – is the leading innovator in the area of speech technologies operating in EMEA and UK. In addition to making audio archives fully searchable by keyword deploying a specially trained Automatic Speech Recognition engine, Spitch has recently implemented a solution that helps decrease PCI DSS compliance costs with one of the major telecoms companies in the UK.

The client wanted to use voice input (card number dictation) for their product that would process the transactions with the payment service provider automatically, excluding the call centre agent involvement. Spitch has met this need in an easy and elegant way:

  • When the customer would like to make a payment by credit card, the call centre agent steers the call to a dedicated app;
  • The app asks the credit card number and CV code and sends the audio stream to Spitch ASR server;
  • The app then sends credit card number and CV code received from Spitch ASR server to payment service provider;
  • The app returns the call to the agent with the result from payment service provider.

The client wanted to use voice input (card number dictation) for their product that would process the transactions with the payment service provider automatically, excluding the call centre agent involvement. Spitch has met this need in an easy and elegant way

The error rate was considerably reduced when compared to data provided by the previous speech tech suppliers.

This underlines the importance of identifying technology providers that can guarantee a bespoke level of service in the enterprise segment, combining focused adjustment and fine-tuning of solutions with easy scalability and reasonably quick fully-fledged implementation.

If you would like to get further information on this topic and related opportunities, please register for our webinar to be held on 11 May 2017, or contact us directly.



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