VoxSmart, a provider of mobile surveillance technology, has acquired the trading business of Fonetic with a view to delivering a complete communications surveillance offering that addresses market demand for consolidation and integration compliance and surveillance solutions.
The acquisition, financial details of which have not been disclosed, follows some high-profile regulatory investigations and prosecutions, such as the WhatsApp scandal at KPMG and the FCA’s prosecution of a VTB Banker over deleted WhatsApp messages. For VoxSmart, it is a logical progression into the wider surveillance market.
VoxSmart’s mobile surveillance business services over 100 global clients, while the trading business of Fonetic includes multilingual voice and e-comms surveillance and intelligence tools, as well as a trade reconstruction engine.
Oliver Blower, CEO at VoxSmart, says: “We have always worked closely with market participants to tackle compliance challenges and we’ve seen overwhelming demand for multichannel and multilingual offerings that not only meet communication surveillance needs, but also ease the procurement and supply chain burden. The Fonetic team and technology will help us support institutions at the forefront of financial services.”
Noting the financial and reputational damage caused by unmonitored or ignored communications, and that fixed line audio, mobile phones and messaging platforms are seen as the weak spots in bank’s surveillance capabilities and are the first to be exploited by bad actors, Juan Manuel Soto, CEO at Fonetic, says: “By pooling our talent and technology, clients will benefit from enhanced data integration, as well as increased visibility of their trading activity.”
Fonetic will continue to operate in the customer experience market, where it already provides Conversational Chatbots and Voicebots based on natural language processing (NLP) in European and Latin American markets.
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