At this year’s XLoD Global – the largest event of its kind ever – one of the most interesting developments was a resurgence of the idea of holistic or integrated surveillance. This is the previously much-hyped idea that trade, e-comms and voice surveillance would be integrated into, effectively, one system in which trade alerts would be supplemented in real-time by the emails, messages and voice calls associated with the relevant trade data to give analysts an easier and more data-rich alert.
If we’re all honest, when this idea was first mooted, neither the technology nor the banks’ data was up to the task. The best some of the larger banks could do was to give analysts easier access to the e-comms system so that when looking at alerts, or in an escalation, they could slightly more easily trawl through emails and messages to find relevant material. Incorporating voice was not attempted.
However, the advance of technology has made integrated or holistic surveillance a realistic near-term goal.
Why? First, voice is now a solvable problem. Both translation and transcription can now be done at scale, in real time, across all voice communications. So, banks should no longer be constrained to surveil only their most common languages, or to sample only a fraction of their calls. This means that transcribed voice calls can now easily be pulled into e-comms surveillance systems to create a unified communications surveillance engine.
Second, advances in analytics, both traditional and AI, are transforming both comms and trade surveillance. In comms surveillance, banks can choose to move away from lexicon-only-based communications surveillance, adopting a more anomaly-based, meta-data-driven approach.
In trade surveillance, behavioural analysis allows institutions to supplement or replace traditional scenario-based approaches, in which offences mentioned by regulators are modelled by rules-based parameters.
And third, partly under regulatory pressure banks are finally starting to solve their internal and external data problems, making integrating these different, previously siloed, surveillance processes much more straightforward.
As a result, banks now already have a choice of vendors in this space. One or two now offer a holistic platform incorporating trade, e-comms, voice and other contextual data including news. More offer platforms created in partnership with vendors in those areas and delivered through one portal.
So, nearly ten years after we first heard the term ‘holistic’, we are now at the point where one XLoD Global attendee agreed that “In the near future, people will not have separate trade, e-comms and voice surveillance systems, they will have just one system.”