Fonetic, a provider of voice recognition and linguistics analytics, has set up a partnership with Tango Networks, a provider of business mobility services, to offer a mobile voice recording and speech analytics system designed to help financial institutions meet voice compliance requirements on the trading floor. The solution is a server software overlay that can be used to search for voice recordings, chats, emails and attachments, and analyse their content to find key components in a conversation.
Simon Richards, CEO of Fonetic, says that compared to transcription-based services offered by competitors, the Fonetic and Tango solution provides a much higher success rate based on a more accurate understanding of inflection. This is achieved by analysing a complete data set rather than using a keyword search and allows firms to find relevant conversations even when key topics have not been mentioned specifically. With many calls and emails barely referencing original source material or unlikely to mention the specifics of a deal, he notes that this is crucial for firms to find the information they need for compliance purposes.
He explains: “Our solution means banks can become Title 7 compliant under Dodd-Frank. The reason they can become compliant is that the Title says a bank must be able to provide, on demand, in 14 hours, all calls pertaining to swap derivatives, whether or not they were completed trades. The banks have 14 hours to find the calls. If you take a bank that has 2,000 traders working across the globe eight hours a day, that’s about 2.6 million hours of conversation recorded from calls. We can find the calls in about two minutes.”
Fonetic takes a hardware agnostic approach to provide a Dodd-Frank Title 7 solution that can be connected to the front office, allowing firms to perform a full reconstruction of a trade with pre-trade, during and post-trade information. Looking forward, Richards says Fonetic’s goal is to expand its biometric capabilities, with recent voice developments allowing it to differentiate individual callers, identify counterparties and conduct further analysis. He concludes: “Dodd-Frank Title 7 is the tip of the iceberg. There is also Dodd-Frank Title 10 on the retail side and Tier 2 banks and major corporates that trade their own commodities and could use our technology.”
