Communications Intelligence

Narrator:
Digital communications are the lifeblood of your organization. The traditional office will never be the same. Employees are more distributed than ever before. Communications data is piling up with complexity that is changing by the moment. Legacy technology can't keep up. The market is changing, and the risks to your company's reputation and bottom line are growing day by day.

Narrator:
Are you ready? It's time to collaborate, protect, transform. You are the hero of this story. Introducing the future of communications capture, archiving, and analysis. Communications Intelligence. Are you ready?

Brian Cramer:
I'm Brian Cramer, CEO of Smarsh. We're here to share best practices and bring to life the vision of cutting-edge compliance. These groups have been accomplishing breakthroughs using methods and technologies that weren't available before. As much as we focus on it though, technology isn't enough by itself. Improvements in process and method, and most importantly, collaboration, are key to success.

Brian Cramer:
Over the past two years, we've internally developed a lot of products and technologies, and we've made multiple acquisitions. All of this activity was part of a plan, a plan that led to today's introduction of Communications Intelligence. A main ingredient in these efforts is our close collaboration with our customers, big and small, from the largest banks in the world, to smaller specialized investment advisory firms and brokerages.

Brian Cramer:
This is a monumental step forward in the evolution of the archive as we know it. What this technology does will change compliance going forward. Of course, with the world suddenly working from home, our plans accelerated. And standing here today, we do not see the resulting increase in volumes of data, nor the increase in the complexity that we're dealing with, reducing or changing anytime soon. Not only will Communications Intelligence allow you to surface the signals in your data and find the risk more quickly and accurately, it will provide the ability to streamline IT efforts, reduce TCO, and drive multiple outcomes simultaneously across multiple business lines from the same footprint of data.

Brian Cramer:
As mentioned, the past 18 months have seen a massive acceleration of trends that were already in motion, and have caused among many of our customers the need to reimagine, rearchitect, and rebuild their compliance infrastructure and approach. Leading this customer dialogue is our very own chief product officer, Goutam Nadella. He'll share our insights from those conversations and how they've influenced our efforts with the Communications Intelligence Platform. Goutam. Take it away.

Goutam Nadella:
So let me start off by picking on a couple of things that Brian touched on. So I think the shift in the workforce, and not just embracing digital communication tools, and a whole bunch of them. So there's so many variety of digital communication tools, but also the work from home. Shifting from working from home full-time to now a hybrid workforce, that's something we see as a secular shift. I think we all are beginning to understand that it's something that is going to stay. But that's also something that's impacting all our customers, whether you're the largest tier one bank, the largest asset manager in the world, or you're an independent broker-dealer or a small RIA. The shift in the workforce and the adoption of these digital tools is impacting everyone equally.

Goutam Nadella:
What's really happening at a high level and what we see and what we hear from all our customers is really, I think, the innovation that is going into all these digital communication tools that has been compressed in a very short amount of time is outpacing, in a big way, the investment that is going into compliance infrastructure to be able to keep up, or regulated organizations to be able to keep up. That's impacting everyone's ability to move the compliance programs into the future, to adapt to all of this shift in workforce and how they use communication tools.

Goutam Nadella:
Thematically, I want to touch on three themes that we've heard really from all our customers, and we also see from our vantage point. The first one is, it's the volume and the variety of data. So as people embrace these communication tools, there's been a big quantum leap in the amount of data that is generated by these tools. If you're a large enterprise, we used to talk about terabytes of data. Now, we're talking about multiple petabytes of data. We need to capture and analyze multiple petabytes of data. It's equally true for smaller organizations. Maybe it's not petabytes, but the shift and the leap in the amount of data people have to process and supervise has taken a quantum leap. That's challenge number one.

Goutam Nadella:
Challenge number two is really... And so what that really has done. And it's also not just a scale of data, it's the variety of data. So it's not only text communication anymore. It's audio, it's video, it's social media usage, it's the variety of data, it's structured, it's unstructured. How do you then ingest and process all of this data and analyze it? That's challenge number one.

Goutam Nadella:
Challenge number two, I think, is most of the communication compliance infrastructure really has been very fragmented, and for a reason. So some of the decisions around the acquisition of these technologies has been... The decisions have been made in silos. And what that has done is fragment the compliance infrastructure. And it's also natural, because innovation has happened at different points and different layers of this infrastructure. We'll talk about the archive, or the capture capabilities, or surveillance capabilities, or supervision capabilities. So as innovation has happened at different points, these decisions were made to acquire best of breed technology at different points, and that has led to fragmentation. Now, that would've been okay, and it's been okay up until now. You want to always get best of breed technology. But as we deal with this tectonic shift in terms of scale and variety of data, it has a compounding effect to the cost of fragmented infrastructure, both in explicit cost of running it, but also the risk that emanates from fragmented infrastructure.

Goutam Nadella:
The third point I would like to touch on thematically is regulators. Not only do organizations now have to contend with this, all of this change has not gone unnoticed from a regulatory standpoint. Regulators are increasingly looking to collaborate. And it's, I think, a great thing for the industry looking to collaborate not just with us as technology providers, but also with all of our customers to understand how we can adapt to this new reality. They're encouraging and looking for firms. And for the industry to collaborate in general, and how do we leverage public cloud infrastructure as an example, how do we leverage AI and groundbreaking technologies to adapt to this scale? And I think that is something we are seeing across the board in the industry. They're asking questions on, how do we leverage advanced technologies to do voice surveillance, for example? Or how do you scale compliance programs when you're dealing with a global multilingual workforce? So that's some of the things we see.

Goutam Nadella:
I think now more than ever, given everything I just talked about, it's important for the industry at large. Not just practitioners, but vendors like ourselves, providing technology, regulators, infrastructure providers, whether it's cloud providers or communication tool providers, to collaborate, to overcome some of these challenges. Because the technology exists, whether it's public cloud infrastructure, leveraging public cloud infrastructure. The broad adoption that we are seeing in financial industry will allow us to scale infrastructure to meet today's data need, or it's the leveraging AI and transformational technology through AI, such as better transcription of voice. It's reducing false positives through the use of NLP, transformer models. All of these technologies, and which have further been adapted to our domain and pioneered by digital reasoning, these technologies exist for us to be able to tackle some of these challenges.

Goutam Nadella:
To be able to leverage these technologies, the important thing is really, how do you actually set yourself up for the future? Again, if you implement these technologies in a fragmented manner, we will not see the results we all want. What's important is to have a holistic data strategy, to invest in a platform that future proofs your compliance program, not for the next 1, 2, 3 years, but for the next five years. To have a centralized data strategy, how do you capture and store all your data so that you can apply AI, and extract intelligence and signals from all that data?

Goutam Nadella:
With that in mind, and we're really proud at Smarsh that our product strategy is deeply rooted in what we see in the industry and what our customers needs are. With a lot of these challenges in mind is the reason why we're launching Communications Intelligence Platform today. It is our effort to bring to the industry a single platform to which you can capture and archive all your digital communications data, to apply AI, to extract intelligence and signals that drive your business forward at scale and securely, through the power of public cloud infrastructure and leveraging advanced AI capabilities.

Goutam Nadella:
Enough of me talking about Communications Intelligence. I really want to show you a real-world example live. That will go into a video that shows you a real-world example of how you can leverage Communications Intelligence Platform to drive your compliance programs forward into the future.

Narrator:
It's the 7:00 AM morning call for the trading floor. Prior to COVID, employees dialed in from their desks. Nowadays, many are using Teams at home. The trading desk head indicates that their lead on a high-profile multi-billion dollar corporate issuance. It's highly sensitive information that will move the bond markets. Two of the traders are listening to the call from home. After hearing about the issuance, Peter sends Nick a suspicious Teams message requesting that he call him offline. Nick calls Peter from his personal phone. They're both upset over what they felt were unfair bonuses. Peter suggests to Nick that they may be able to use today's information to get a little parting gift.

Narrator:
Nick's part of a private Twitter group called The Walking Dead. He alerts the group to the trading opportunity. It's a group of Wall Street folks who are planning on leaving their jobs and share sensitive information. Nick's supervisor would see him if he were on the trading floor, but at home, nobody can see what's happening.

Narrator:
Meanwhile, Ella is an analyst on the compliance team. Her bank uses Smarsh's Communication Intelligence Platform for capture archiving and surveillance across all their communications. An alert powered by machine learning pops up in conduct intel called Change of Venue, which warns her of Nick and Peter's suspicious activity. Looking at their relationship profile, it's clear they're close friends and have also been complaining a lot recently. Ella discovers that they're in the same morning meeting and pulls up the transcript. Despite the call being a full hour, Smarsh marries innovative tooling with domain adapted transcription, so she can quickly identify that the call had sensitive information. The previous Team's message makes sense now. Ella searches for The Walking Dead across billions of records in the archive. Unfortunately, this is also the name of a popular show, and returns far too many false positives.

Narrator:
T ime to leverage industry leading AI powered by Digital Reasoning. She opens a scenario builder and filters out all non-business context, then adds a semantic match for "time to watch an episode" to match contextual meaning instead of exact keywords. The results are markedly better and even include hits in other languages. 9,000 hits are now less than 200. Investigating further, Ella uncovers that Nick and Peter are part of a broader network of individuals inside and outside the bank, covering up the misbehavior with these code words.

Narrator:
The new work environment is creating new challenges, which require new technology. Smarsh simplifies your communications technology stack and unlocks the value with your communications. Capture over 80 channels in full fidelity. Archive with multi-petabyte global scale. Monitor all communications across languages. Streamline in-house investigations and e-discovery. A single cloud-native platform that scales to the size of the challenges you face. Unlock the signals in your communications. This is Communications Intelligence.

Goutam Nadella:
Awesome. That's very exciting, hopefully, for all of you. While that story might be all fiction, the technologies are anything but, that you see in the video. So we're very excited to bring all of those capabilities to you through a single platform that will allow you to derive and generate signals from all your communications data. Today at Advance, the event really is designed to dive deep into understanding some of these challenges, and how organizations of all sizes are dealing with some of these challenges and adapting best of breed capabilities. And a great example of this is our next keynote set presentation, which will feature Una Neary, global chief compliance officer of BlackRock, Tim Estes, founder of Digital Reasoning, as they come together to discuss how the largest asset manager has embraced this transformation, invested in innovation, and adapted to this new reality and extracted a lot of leverage from all of their data to drive their business forward.