London-based communications surveillance specialist VoxSmart Ltd., has acquired speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP) provider GreenKey Technologies for an undisclosed sum. The deal will enable VoxSmart to strengthen its communications surveillance offering to global financial institutions, as it moves to position itself as a leader in NLP and voice analytics for financial markets.
The acquisition follows a $25 million growth equity investment injection from Toscafund earlier this year, made with transactions such as this in mind.
“GreenKey have been developing extremely advanced natural language processing over the last eight years, having invested close to $30 million on research, development and design since 2013,” says VoxSmart CEO Oliver Blower. “This has involved analysing thousands of hours of audio and text to ensure the models and engines which run the NLP platform are accurate and finely tuned to ensure accuracy. These models are in production with five Tier 1 banks, some of whom are existing customers of VoxSmart and spoke extremely highly of the capability and how it has transformed their respective businesses.”
VoxSmart will continue to operate GreenKey Technologies as a brand and product in its own right. Blower says the two technology platforms are highly complementary: “VoxSmart and GreenKey have collaborated for many years on mutual customers, mutual business opportunities and partnerships, therefore their technology, teams and management were very well known to us. Given our strategic direction of travel around communications data, we felt the technology would be very additive and complementary to our own product portfolio and would allow us to deliver even greater value to our customers,” he says. “We will also look to integrate the underlying NLP and speech recognition models and engines in to our own surveillance capabilities.”
Existing GreenKey customers will continue to be supported in exactly the way they have been, says Blower. “There will be complete business continuity and commitment to service levels. All GreenKey customers will now benefit from a worldwide team of over 100 technology professionals supporting, developing and innovating the platform, in addition to 24/7 global support in a variety of languages and physical presence in every major financial centre in the world.”
Subscribe to our newsletter
