Australia: ASIC hopes to use voice analytics to detect crooked insurance sales calls

Financial watchdog Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) sees a future where artificial intelligence including machine learning, text analytics, voice analytics, and other technologies are a seamless component of financial services firms' business models, the regulatory agency's chairman James Shipton has said.

Speaking at ASIC’s RegTech Voice Analytics Symposium last month, Mr Shipton said that ASIC had chosen this area because in August 2018, the regulator released a report  –“The sale of direct life insurance”  – which found that sales practices and product design were leading to poor consumer outcomes.

“As I said at the time, life insurance is a long-term product, but cancellation rates and poor claim outcomes showed that Australians were being sold products they didn’t want, couldn’t afford, or didn’t perform as they expected,” he said. He added that there would be a future where firms can record, store and analyse all communications with consumers using the various technologies. They would provide firms with near to real time insights, as well as after-the-fact insights on quality and compliance.

ASIC’s Financial Services team has conducted a trial involving 1,700 life insurance sales calls to test whether voice analytics and voice-to-text could be applied to the dataset and actually replicate what ASIC staff members did when they manually reviewed those calls.

Recognising indicators of poor sales practice in life insurance calls

However, findings from the trial indicate that the RegTech initiative will only really be effective if insurers start to record calls at higher quality, reported Itnews. One of the issues is that current call recording systems were not designed with voice analytics in mind.

Ms Barbara Buettner, senior manager for insurers in ASIC’s financial services group, said, “Call quality did affect transcription quality, and it affected the ability to do some word searches and more complex searches. 

“Because of the call quality issues, we were down to the low hundreds of good [quality] calls, and that affected our ability to to use voice signals, which was quite an important component of the trial.”

Source: Asia Insurance Review