IBM and Dubber weigh in on the drive to comply and end not knowing

How is Voice AI meeting a growing need for faster, more accurate compliance management?

And why does Voice AI work hand-in-hand with proactive compliance?

At a recent IBM – Dubber webinar and round table, compliance industry leaders across the country talked about major compliance mandates affecting their performance. They were troubled by the new Work-from-Anywhere reality and how it’s off-setting rising regulatory demands on financial services and other industries.

During the webinar, fintech expert and Chief Customer Officer of Dubber, Andy Lark, together with Anthone Withers, Head of Public Cloud at IBM discussed the rising role of voice intelligence in stepping up compliance and removing legacy obstacles. They focused on how voice intelligence technology is meeting a growing demand for proactive compliance reporting.

See key takeaways on how to meet rising regulatory demands in 2021

Research shows a growing need to manage voice data in compliance

A history of compliance failures, cross-border mandates, and the growing list of guidelines since the Hayne Royal Commission and GFC are turning compliance and risk management into an increasingly complex task.

The Hayne Royal Commission claimed compliance was highly challenged by the common malpractice of using voice conversations to sell inappropriate products to customers. Deloitte in response, advised the industry to invest in compliance programs that embed data into their DNA. With the shift to data-driven compliance, voice data was inadequately addressed or was missing altogether.

A once impossible task now possible

“Voice has largely been captured in silos and locked into those silos. A voice intelligence platform now enables any conversation to be captured from any eligible end-point, then stored and analysed in a single compliant cloud instance.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

When coupled with IBM Watson, voice data is transformed into intelligent compliance insights. The combination shifts financial services and other regulated industries from a rear-view perspective to always knowing in real time.

When Covid hit and created a new ‘work-from-anywhere’ reality, compliance teams needed to capture and track conversations over a huge set of new endpoints and apps including mobile, Zoom, MS Teams, Cisco Webex and more. Suddenly, the impossible task of managing voice data at scale called for voice intelligence tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The power of combining voice data with Watson IBM

Unleashing IBM Watson with Dubber Voice AI on conversation datasets ushered in a new way to analyse conversational data while managing it in a secure environment.

The IBM Watson – Dubber partnership made it finally possible for managers to gain insights into customer conversations and leverage predictive analytics. Managers could now use triggers on keywords and alerts to search and generate reports in real time.

A brave new remote world jeopardizes compliance mandates

“We’ve seen a surge in the use of Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and more. The meeting online tsunami has created the need for compliant call recording, with all recordings – mobile, web and traditional handsets, unified in one place.” Andy Lark, Dubber

This switch to off-premise communications gave rise to a new remote worker and a growing reliance on mobile devices and applications. With that, new compliance issues arose. For instance, when remote financial workers recorded a business meeting on a popular application, unknowingly they broke many industry compliance mandates.

In effect, the data was not stored in a sovereign way, a privacy notification was not issued and workers were not redacting key data. Personal call recording simply did not meet compliance standards.

Time to knowing

“The new challenge is the time it takes to know if your compliance standing has been compromised.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

Traditional approaches to call recording resulted in useful dashboards for managing a call centre but today do little to meet the needs of compliance teams required to search terabytes of data in real time across multiple end-points – Or more importantly, being alerted on information misuse and policy breaches.

“Together with IBM we solved this at scale by enabling vast conversational data sets to be created and turning them into compelling insights” – Andy Lark, Dubber

Let’s look at a typical bank breach use case: Let’s say there is a serious customer complaint flagged across five years. The average time to assemble data could take up to eight hours of needle-in-a-haystack work. But with Watson IBM and Dubber, the task is reduced to 10 seconds. Anthone Withers pivoted to other important advantages: “You have proof, you have a transcript highlighting keywords that shouldn’t be in the conversation and you have sentiment analytics. Better still, all these insights that expose risk can be pulled into dashboards and reports in real time.”

In summary

Digital acceleration and remote work added multiple communication end-points that began to severely compromise compliance and fraud detection, just as regulatory demands were growing. What’s become clear is; compliance solutions that integrate voice intelligence can produce more cost-efficient and more productive compliance practices, and finally, deliver proactive compliance.