Symphony, a markets infrastructure and technology firm, has joined forces with Google to bolster its voice analytics offering for banks and investment firms. This collaboration aims to address heightened regulatory scrutiny surrounding communications compliance within the financial sector.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s imposition of over $2 billion in fines, primarily attributed to lapses in tracking or recording business-related text messages sent via unauthorized platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns, has intensified regulatory oversight in this domain, Reuters news report said.
Amidst a sector-wide crackdown on messages and emails, financial institutions are now bracing for potential investigations into their utilization of voice and video calls, of which only a small fraction is routinely recorded and preserved, as per sources cited by Reuters last month.
Symphony, boasting a clientele that includes major banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, among its 1,000-strong client base, intends to leverage Google Cloud’s advanced generative artificial intelligence platform, Vertex AI. This collaboration aims to augment its Cloud9 voice product with enhanced speech-to-text and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities.
The Cloud9 product facilitates collaboration among trading teams across various asset classes like commodities, interest rate swaps, and equity derivatives. With the integration of Google Cloud’s technology, conversations over Cloud9 will undergo more accurate transcription for retention purposes. Moreover, suspicious discussions can be flagged for review upon detection.
Zac Maufe, global head of Regulated Industries at Google Cloud, remarked, “Generative AI has the potential to transform the trading landscape from automating routine tasks to identifying potential misconduct through anomalies in data.”
In addition to compliance-driven transcription and analysis, users will harness the data to extract insights that could influence sales or trading strategies while monitoring the overall customer experience.
Brad Levy, Symphony CEO, outlined plans to introduce the enhanced product to the market by Q2, emphasizing its role as a platform for data insights. Phil Moyer, VP of Google Cloud’s Global AI Business, highlighted that the platform would make compliance more “ambient” in the face of the burgeoning data landscape.
