Overcoming the challenges of transcription on the trade floor

The emergence of advanced technologies such as speech, text analytics and voice biometrics more than 20 years ago created a significant shift in contact centres looking to gain invaluable insights about customer experience to turn into action with positive results. Over time, as the analytics engines have improved, organisations have started to leverage such technologies for more than just insight – and this has not gone unnoticed within the FI industry.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, regulators globally have begun to increasingly bare their teeth at the banking industry. An increase in regulation and levels of scrutiny have resulted in a much higher internal demand being placed upon the risk and compliance teams who support the trading floor. Transcription offered a promising avenue for these teams to be more proactive in their monitoring – however, the reality has been that trade floors have not been able to leverage this technology with the same success as contact centres and this has been largely due to the ‘trader speak’ and lingo commonplace in that environment. Fast talking traders, switching between jargon and multiple languages in the same sentence are simply beyond the limits of the traditional transcription engines.

Now, post-pandemic, as regulatory scrutiny is increasing, many traders continue to enjoy hybrid, flexible working environments and are communicating on a broader range of channels than ever before. This places even greater pressure on Compliance and Surveillance teams to proactively monitor communications.

Fortunately, times are changing, and transcription and speech analytics tools are reaching the trade floor market with a select few yielding higher transcription accuracy than ever before, with the ability to detect bad behaviour and potentially increase productivity and regulatory adherence.

Being able to view captured communications centrally, regardless of channel and then orchestrating transcription from a single pane, is proving key to success.

The Challenges

When it comes to the accurate transcription of trade floor conversations for analysis or investigation, a unique set of challenges are presented for compliance teams:

1.Diverse language, slang, jargon, and terminology

As international hubs where individuals from different backgrounds and cultures come together, the diversity of trading floor and banking environments can introduce complexities in voice transcription due to variations in accents, dialects, and industry-specific jargon. Compliance teams must ensure that transcriptions accurately capture the intended meaning of conversations, even when language barriers or technical terminology exist.

Further complexity can arise when one trader may begin a conversation in English and switch to another language, Mandarin (for example) mid-conversation. A transcription tool offering accuracy but also the ability to cope with this, with the capability to flag to Surveillance, does exist in our solution.

2. Integration with compliance and surveillance monitoring tools

For complex investigations involving large volumes of calls, finding, downloading, and transcribing every call can be a long, tedious process. While some organisations have attempted to stitch together their own solutions to integrate audio recording and third-party transcription software it is important, to retain accuracy, that the transcription solution should not exist in isolation and should seamlessly integrate with existing compliance surveillance tools. Providing teams with a holistic view of trading floor activities, combining transcriptions with other data sources can enable more comprehensive surveillance and facilitates effective risk identification and management.

3. Accuracy

Maintaining accuracy in voice transcriptions is paramount for compliance teams. Errors or inaccuracies in transcriptions often come from transcription engines which are unable to cope with trader speed and jargon. This can lead to misinterpretation or missed information, resulting in potential compliance breaches. One of the keys to overcoming this is to work with a solution that is pre-trained on trader domain lingo and slang, with enhanced tuning on your organisation’s specific language. The end result is that the solution trains itself over time.

The future of data interaction management and voice technology continues to evolve. Through our close work with compliance and IT teams in regulated firms so are we, helping future proof the management and analysis of voice records in regulated environments.

Wordwatch now offers the enhanced capability of transcribing calls for compliance monitoring and ease of search. If you wish to ease the burden on your compliance and IT teams, maintain market integrity, and ensure a robust and transparent trading environment, contact our compliance transformation experts.