Introduction of Automated Cloud-Based Transcription Service for Trader Voice Communications

NICE COMPASS Discovery accelerates investigations and automates manual processes around large volumes of trade-related recorded calls

Today we are introducing NICE COMPASS Discovery, a new automated, cloud-based trader voice transcription service. The new service builds on the successful launch of the NICE COMPASS compliance assurance solution late last year by giving Financial Services Organizations (FSO’s) new capabilities to save time and money, and improve responsiveness to regulators.

Whether initiated by regulators or FSOs’ own internal teams, extraction and review of large volumes of trader voice recordings are becoming the norm. Rapid response to investigative requests (in some cases within 72 hours) is mandated by a host of regulations and standards, including MiFID II, FX Code of Conduct and Dodd-Frank. Increasingly, when such requests are made, regulators and legal teams often request transcripts of trade-related calls, in addition to a complete set of voice recordings.

For complex investigations involving large volumes of calls, finding, downloading and transcribing every call can be a long, tedious process. There are additional costs and delays when recordings need to be sent to an outside company for transcription. Some financial services organizations have even resorted to trying to stitch together their own solutions using middleware to integrate audio recording and third-party transcription software. NICE COMPASS Discovery’s cloud-based automated transcription service fills this gap by providing a one-stop solution without the headaches, and by dramatically improving the speed, consistency and quality of transcriptions.

Working alongside the powerful capabilities of NICE COMPASS, including Automated Bulk Call Extraction, NICE COMPASS Discovery helps firms accelerate investigations and improve their responsiveness to regulators by automating costly and time-consuming manual processes around retrieving, downloading and transcribing large volumes of trade-related communications. Downloaded calls are automatically ingested into the NICE cloud-based voice-to-text transcription system, transcribed and then packaged together with transcriptions and relevant metadata for easy sharing with regulators and other requestors. FSO’s benefit from:

  • Faster investigation turnaround times: Trader investigation turnaround times are significantly reduced. There’s no waiting to send audio recordings out to an external company for manual transcription, and no waiting days to get transcripts back.
  • Cost savings: FSOs no longer need to send audio recordings out to expensive third-party providers for manual transcription; they only purchase the processing hours they need.
  • Fewer headaches: NICE COMPASS Discovery offers an all-in-one solution without the headaches of custom integration and middleware.
  • Scalability: FSOs can download and transcribe over a million recordings a day, and add more capacity as needed.
  • Greater accuracy and consistency: NICE COMPASS Discovery’s hosted speech-to-text transcription solution is powered by Nexidia, NICE’s award-winning automatic speech recognition engine, which offers an extremely high degree of consistency compared to other automated transcription tools and manual (human) transcription methods.

Additionally, trader communications come with a unique set of problems for transcription – including slang and jargon, overlapping speech and pitch variations, and short audio clips. NICE’s speech recognition engine returns highly accurate results regardless of audio quality, speaker accents, dialects, slang and non-standard grammatical patterns. NICE COMPASS Discovery’s transcription engine is also able to accurately transcribe audio in 44 different languages.

NICE COMPASS Discovery was designed to work with the NICE Trading Recording System (NTR). Used by most of the world’s leading banks and investment firms to record and retain trade conversations from turrets, desk phones, mobile phones, and Unified Communications platforms, NTR is an "all-in-one" compliance-focused trade conversation recording platform.

NICE COMPASS Discovery is part of the NICE COMPASS solution suite. NICE COMPASS helps Financial Services Organizations streamline their compliance assurance processes through automated provisioning, system health checks, call extraction, compliance assurance reporting, and now automated transcription.