Spanish interaction analytics firm launches globally; Signs worldwide deal with The Santander Group to deliver record keeping Dodd Frank compliance in 5 languages

Fonetic, the first company to offer a Trading Record Keeping Compliance Solution that directly meets the Dodd-Frank Act needs of trading floors, has today announced its launch into North America and Europe following rapid growth in customer demand for its linguistics-based speech and text analytics solution. The launch coincides with the signing of an agreement with The Santander Group, one of the largest banks in the world in terms of market capitalization, to implement Fonetic’s solution in five languages across seven of its major international trading rooms throughout Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia.

Designed to create more transparency and accountability, the current Dodd-Frank Act in North America and future MiFID II Act in Europe will bring significant changes to existing global regulatory frameworks. The Dodd-Frank Act places rigorous recordkeeping compliance obligations on financial institutions with more than $3bn in transactions, which must be able to provide regulators with all interactions related to a single operation, such as a SWAPS or derivative trade, in a maximum 72-hour timeframe. With traders conducting millions of high volume trades every minute via phone, email and online chat services, the challenge for trading floors to achieve full compliance before the April 2014 deadline has been vast.

Bernt Ostergaard, Service Director at Quocirca, the global research and analyst firm said, “Clearly, the large financial institutions need to speed up their compliance processes work to meet the aggressive Dodd-Frank deadlines. But beyond compliance, the linguistics-based ability to near real-time monitor trading over phone, email and chat will improve their ability to identify and thwart rogue transactions.”

Fonetic’s Trading Record Keeping Compliance Solution has adapted complex linguistics-based interaction analytics software, powered by the Nuance voice recognition technology, to directly meet these compliance requirements. Its award-winning solution, originally developed four years ago for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) as a record keeping compliance platform, enables compliance teams to analyse and understand core aspects of conversations in order to both proactively prevent market abuse and adhere to stringent legislation. The solution captures, indexes, analyses and extracts relevant unstructured data from all voice, email and chat interactions, enabling compliance officers to find specific, relevant communications about any given trade. By monitoring up to 79 different languages and dialects, the Fonetic solution can reconstruct all interactions associated with a trade in moments.

“The simple reality is that all the world’s leading banks will have to comply with Dodd-Frank by April 2014 or risk severe penalties. The challenge for banks is how to compete in the highly dynamic derivatives and swaps markets and not be over-burdened by compliance processes,” explained Juan Manuel Soto, CEO, Fonetic. “For the past four years, Fonetic has honed its expertise and technical understanding within its domestic market, delivering stress-free record-keeping compliance to some of the biggest banks in Spain. Starting today, our solution is now available to banks and trading firms globally, and we look forward to ensuring that traders can continue to work in the most efficient way, while still providing compliance departments with the reassurance they need to trace every interaction on any given trade if required to by regulators.”

About Fonetic
Fonetic helps businesses and institutions get to know and understand their customers better.  The company works with major international banks, contact centres and utility companies including Vodafone, Telefonica, BBVA, Direct Line (Linea Directa) and TNT.  Fonetic brings social media, data analytics, sentiment analysis and unstructured data together into a single multi-channel, multi-language solution that decodes customer behavior and makes recommendations on how to act.  Its Dodd-Frank Record Keeping Compliance Solution is the only linguistic-based solution in the market that enables banks to meet the latest recordkeeping requirements on derivative and swap trading ahead of the compliance deadline of April 2014.