US asset manager Fidelity Investments has created a new business unit focusing on helping clients manage their public communications in a fully compliant way. The new unit – Saifr – offers human augmentation tools to help financial institutions create, review, and approve public communications to mitigate brand, reputational, and regulatory risk.
Saifr emerged from Fidelity Labs, Fidelity Investments’ in-house software incubator and digital studio. Founded in 2005, Fidelity maintains a portfolio of new businesses and is constantly prototyping concepts for Fidelity’s next new ventures. Saifr uses a set of proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) models that are trained on tens of millions of compliance-reviewed data records, including proprietary and third-party compliance-curated public data points found in data lakes built by Fidelity and leveraging decades of regulatory compliance expertise.
This approach powers two solutions, SaifrReview and SaifrScan, which aim to foster greater collaboration between marketing and compliance teams to create compliant communications, faster. Both products use NLP to handle the monotonous tasks of compliance review, while allowing marketers and compliance teams to focus on the more creative and complex details of the compliance review process.
“Ensuring that marketing materials are compliant with various regulatory rules requires multiple touchpoints inside and outside an organization,” says Vall Herard, Managing Director of Saifr, at Fidelity Labs. These touchpoints include content creation, compliance feedback, revisions, e-mail, and workflow hand-offs, he says. “As a result, the process can be inefficient and create the opportunity for friction and risk.”
Herard adds: “Saifr’s AI solutions create a human-machine partnership that streamlines the compliance process from content creation through the regulatory filing process. By minimizing friction throughout this process, Saifr frees up time for content creators, marketers, copy editors, legal, and compliance specialists to focus on the value-added details.”
Saifr’s products are powered by multiple models that capture the subtleties of language to uncover potential risks, flagging non-compliant language and images in both written content and videos before the first round of review by compliance professionals. Saifr’s AI engine learns continuously through user-in-the-loop interaction, private and third-party public data, and regulatory updates.
Saifr’s primary platform, SaifrReview, is a workflow tool that assists in content creation, including written materials, social media, audio, and video assets. The system provides a dashboard that allows for in-line collaboration between marketing content creators and compliance professionals, as well as approval management, tracking, and assistance filing with regulators. As part of the workflow, SaifrReview provides risk scoring and disclosure detection during document creation, as well as suggestions before final sign-off.
Meanwhile, the SaifrScan API-as-a-Service tool analyses and scores a firm’s communications and flags possible compliance risks. The system uses a set of REST APIs designed for integration into any existing document workflow for support fast analysis of text, images, or video for possible regulatory and corporate compliance violations.
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