Richard Mill, director at Business Systems (UK) Ltd
Business Systems’ Will Davenport on which drivers of change will most affect the financial services sector in 2020
Recent multi-million pound fines levied on financial services firms such as Tullet Prebon have acted as a wake-up call to City CIOs. That’s because the FCA now includes Voice as a record medium, and is no longer prepared to tolerate delays in locating conversations it is examining.
As a direct result, we will witness the formal incorporation of Voice as a peer form of information storage to email, text or internal documentation. That’s not happened to date as it’s historically been an unstructured and fairly unwieldy medium, but modern technology is completely changing that picture.
City firms are starting to manage all their various data assets by using an EIM (Enterprise Information Management) approach. This is a discipline centred on being able to integrate all your data into one structure and applying the right archiving and retrieval workflows across everything you do: we therefore anticipate a great deal of interest in audio-enabled EIM project work in 2020.
Cloud sweeps all before it
In 2020, the cloud tide will be unstoppable. That’s partly because people are used to accessing applications in the cloud or storing data there, but there’s now going to be a push to use cloud as a way to centralise the bank’s IT systems. The argument as to whether the cloud is insecure has long been settled with City CIOs judging cloud as often safer than their existing on-premise solution.
As a result, there’s no reason to continue paying for expensive hardware that requires tending, patching and upgrading. In 2020, look for cloud trading turrets with the back-end being remote and offering porting of voice records into the cloud. That latter step may be a challenge for financial services firms with multiple and legacy voice recording platforms in place, so the cloud move may lead to overdue rationalisation and integration projects.
Ultimately, the cloud represents a whole new approach to consuming IT and building apps in the Square Mile. Financial services firms are frustrated with devoting too much resource to old mainframe systems when they would like the modern technology infrastructure in place to support them to be more agile. Cloud will be very liberating for the sector.
Strong analytics user cases emerge
Analytics technology has evolved and what used to be referred to as dumb data is now a source of business intelligence. Useful data hidden in audio files that used to be discoverable through hours of transcription can now be processed in modern speech analytics systems — making what was originally inert, unstructured data become structured data, which can be easily queried in order to spot patterns and find interesting anomalies.
I predict that in the new decade using speech analytics financial services firms will finally gain a richer understanding of what their customers ask for and find problematic, as data mining probes can be run over a vast set of customer interactions.
It will mean trading floor managers will have even better detection and forensic tools at their disposal to understand what’s happening, which will be a win-win for customer and regulator alike.
In 2020, Voice will be seen an important strategic asset for the financial services firm CIO.
