Autonomy Enables Compliance With UK FSA Regulations

Autonomy Corporation plc, in infrastructure software for the enterprise, announced that its single platform solution for interaction recording and advanced speech analytics enables financial investment firms in the United Kingdom (UK) to comply with upcoming call recording regulations from the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Autonomy’s technology provides recording of relevant investment phone conversations coupled with industry-leading hosted archiving services and the only conceptual search solution that can quickly uncover pertinent communication across email, instant messages, documents, audio and video. This unique single vendor approach enables fully auditable compliance management from call acquisition to disposition.

The amendments to the FSA Conduct of Business Sourcebook (COBS), which will come into effect in March 2009, require that investment firms in the UK record, archive, and make readily accessible relevant electronic communication, including phone conversations, involving transactions across equity, bond, financial commodity and derivative markets. These regulations are designed to help prevent, detect, and deter market abuse, which is one of the most difficult offenses to investigate and prosecute.

"The diversity of industry regulations around the globe has created massive challenges for compliance officers, particularly in multi-national organizations," commented Dr. Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. "Our technology is designed to handle these complexities and uses a common platform to span the entire spectrum of compliance and risk management for an enterprise – from call collection and archiving to analysis and discovery – allowing solutions to be implemented as the demands of business grow. Our ability to automate these operations based on the meaning of information and our highly scalable architecture provides our clients with fast access to their pertinent information, and delivers consistent and auditable information management."

Autonomy’s solutions are built on the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), an information infrastructure that processes content and performs sophisticated analysis operations based on the concepts and context of data. Unlike tape-based solutions, Autonomy can automatically categorize and cluster relevant audio recordings and documents to make them easily accessible for regulatory purposes. In addition to call recording archives, Autonomy’s technology can connect to more than 400 content repositories for over 1,000 different formats, enabling compliance for all types of electronic communication.

Autonomy supports the FSA regulation changes with the following modules:

• Call Acquisition – Autonomy captures interactions between organizations and their clients using highly secure and reliable recording options for VoIP or traditional switch environments. This robust and resilient recording with a full audit trail is used by financial organizations around the globe to meet stringent compliance requirements and provide proactive monitoring for risk management and fraud detection.
• Digital Safe Audio Archive – Autonomy provides a massively scalable, hosted archive service for audio and other electronic communication, utilizing two of England’s most respected high security data centers to provide fully redundant and geographically separated locations. With data preservation on redundant, tamper-proof storage systems, Autonomy’s high availability data centers enable clients to maintain regulation compliance with a single, consolidated, secure online repository that is fully integrated with Autonomy’s advanced risk management technologies. Autonomy processes more than one billion pieces of content a month and offers proven services managing more than 5.25 petabytes of content for the world’s largest organizations including 14 of the top 20 financial firms.
• Interaction Analysis – Autonomy uses advanced speech technology that processes and analyzes voice recordings to allow rapid identification of relevant conversations for compliance or litigation matters. Autonomy fully supports and performs all forms of audio searching including phoneme, word spotting, and uniquely, conceptual search, for the most comprehensive audio retrieval.