London-headquartered ‘regtech’ firm, VoxSmart, will target NZ broking houses among others after opening a Queenstown office in November.
VoxSmart chief operating officer, Adrienne Muir, said local brokers were facing the same compliance pressures as global financial institutions on the back of mounting regulations and changing communication risks.
Returning to her home country after 13 years in senior financial technology roles in the UK to head the Queenstown branch, Muir said securities trading institutions across the world were increasingly looking to technology to ease regulatory headaches.
And she said with traders now communicating with clients via multiple channels, financial services businesses were exposed to compliance risks if they don’t fully capture the information flows.
Launched amid intensifying financial regulatory action in the UK and Europe in 2011, VoxSmart has developed a suite of tools to record and analyse all trader communications.
In a release, VoxSmart says the firm’s “financial voice transcription and real-time instant message capture, supports over 100 clients with regulatory requirements to monitor and reconstruct all trade communications from voice, mobile, email and chat”.
Muir said the comprehensive, cloud-based communications trail enables risk managers to red-flag potential compliance issues almost as they occur.
She said as well as offering real-time surveillance VoxSmart technology allows efficient regulatory audits and reliable “trade reconstruction”.
“We can also help businesses make better decisions from their own data,” Muir said. “We’re turning unstructured information into structured data.”
Before heading to the UK in 2008, Muir worked for over five years as business leader for IT strategy at the NZX, building relationships with local broking networks that she hopes to rekindle.
But the six-person VoxSmart Queenstown office will also service the wider APAC region, she said, complementing the firm’s Melbourne and Singapore offices. As well as London, the company has a presence in New York and Madrid (following the purchase of natural language processing firm, GreenKey, this September).
Currently, the business counts two big Australasian banks as clients.