By Leigh Moody, Chief Commercial Officer at Insightful Technology

On the face of it, automated eComms compliance surveillance software solutions should be an obvious and essential choice for any regulated financial business. However, as is often the case, real life is a lot more complicated. Having spoken to and advised many such organisations, I was recently reminded that often the biggest hurdles to getting the process running are internal challenges.

Having a good discussion with both banking and other technology vendors, you get a good idea of just how convoluted this journey can be. 

The art of persuasion

Compliance and Technology teams often struggle to get internal support, or to present a compelling narrative that excites stakeholders or senior team leaders to invest in new solutions.

It is often the case that stakeholders across larger financial organisations fully appreciate the need for a surveillance solution as a defence against potential compliance issues and the wrath of the regulator, but some struggle to see the wider operational and commercial benefits their insights can deliver. In some smaller organisations this seems to be even more acute, with only the most astute realising the value of their data and its potential beyond straightforward compliance. 

I recently listened to the account of someone who persevered for two years to get her organisation to understand the value and opportunities inherently found in the data it collected. It paid off and stakeholders across the business are now deeply impressed with the commercial benefits and insights gained from surveillance. 

Many financial organisations are missing considerable opportunities due to a business-wide lack of understanding of the true value of their data, albeit with the caveat that the data in question is maintained to a good standard

Data quality

Getting stakeholder buy-in is a vital first step, but to successfully surveil and gain insights from eComms it requires having the right quality of data in the first place. With so many eComms and data platforms in use in the modern business comms mix, there is an exponential increase in the amount of unstructured data being generated by financial institutions and their customer interactions. 

This issue of data quality was neatly illustrated a couple of years ago when we conducted an experiment. With the permission of several clients, we took a sample of some of the cleanest data sets they had supplied to us and took them to Microsoft for its modellers to run their AI machine learning algorithms over them. It transpired over the following three weeks, that none of the data was good enough – the models simply weren’t able to work in a manner that didn’t generate a lot more human intervention, because the data simply wasn’t clean, or structured well enough to be suitable for those engines.

Without cleaning up and structuring data it is very hard to extract any value from it – compliance or commercial insights. Unfortunately, many of the organisations we speak to haven’t even begun that journey and some are perhaps unwilling to put the effort in to doing so, even if they are willing to spend above the odds to just get on the AI bandwagon

Embracing the benefits

There can be some difficult, but essential conversations to be had when it comes to facilitating surveillance technology teams to get the buy-in and budget they need to implement a solution. All the relevant stakeholders need to understand the value that the whole business will derive from the right solution, how data is the most valuable asset they have, and how it needs commitment to get the full benefit from it.

Undoubtedly many financial organisations are not used to having their data quality challenged, but honesty over the effort needed to set up the foundations is as essential as getting stakeholder buy-in in the first place.

It is clear to me that banking technology champions and fintech providers need to work together to educate the wider banking sector audience. We need to highlight the true value of data and its potential impact on business success through the right application of an intelligent surveillance system.