International bank, ING, is using a new form of risk identification tool developed by eDiscovery platform, Relativity, in conjunction with Intelligent Voice, the proactive compliance pioneer, which could provide ‘pre-crime’ capabilities.
The company explained that its new Trace application can automatically ingest all forms of communication from bank and company systems, including email, audio, and chat.
As it does, Trace uses rules and criteria determined by an organisation to flag the most relevant data, immediately alerting the risk management and compliance teams to what needs further evaluation. They can then leverage Relativity’s broader platform to move from alert to investigation and all the way through its full lifecycle to eDiscovery, all in a single system.
The ‘pre-crime’ element can be seen in the fact that rules can be pre-programmed to warn an organisation that, for example, traders may be discussing doing something that could be illegal, or too close to the edge of the law, before they have actually committed that act.
I.e. the technology is giving inhouse and compliance teams advance notice that something might be about to happen. It would also no doubt pick up situations where rules have already been broken and employees were discussing what they had done.
Such technology could prevent trading scandals, as happened at other banks back in 2012 in London, as part of the now infamous LIBOR trading debacle.
But it also raises some interesting questions about how an organisation handles such matters where nothing has been done – yet – but traders are perhaps figuring out how they might do it.
Relativity explained that this current deployment at ING grew out of an earlier relationship the bank had with Intelligent Voice (IV), which was capturing voice calls and other data.
ING is using this tech now in its Amsterdam location and is already monitoring almost 400 traders across email and IM, with voice following shortly. This is the beginning of a global roll out that will monitor data from over 1,200 traders worldwide in a dozen languages, they said.
Paul Braakman of ING said: ‘The combination of IV and Relativity has allowed us to build a fully distributed review capability for the compliance monitoring team capable of handling all electronic communications.’
Jordan Domash, General Manager of Relativity Trace, said: ‘We are thrilled to partner with Intelligent Voice and ING on this exciting initiative. Intelligent Voice’s connectors enable ING to push all of their communication data proactively to Relativity Trace, so their compliance team can quickly take action on suspicious activity.’
Intelligent Voice and Relativity Trace are available as both on premises and cloud solutions, they added.
Other companies have also been exploring this area, for example Intraspexion has done pioneering work with this type of approach.