Mastering voice compliance monitoring for regulatory success in 2025

But as a financial services firm, you’re already dealing with meeting high customer expectations, securing personal customer data and trying to stay ahead of the competitive market. So, adding the capture and analysis of voice data into the mix is a challenge that can stretch resources thin. Especially due to the volume of devices that require monitoring, the unstructured and changing data formats across various messaging apps, and the strain on storage demands.

Yet, firms need to get it right to avoid these crippling regulatory penalties. Learn exactly how to approach voice compliance monitoring, and why using a tool like Global Relay can help you automate this intensive process.

The importance of Voice Compliance Monitoring

Voice compliance monitoring (VCM) is the process of capturing and analyzing phone calls, video calls, and voice notes to check that they follow regulatory standards and company rules.

Whether they realize it or not, many customers will already be familiar with this when they call customer service and “consent to a call being recorded for training and monitoring purposes”, encompassing both live conversations and recorded interactions.

Many industries are subject to strict regulations regarding communication. For example, the finance sector’s evolving Dodd Frank Act requires that all communications, including voice recordings be monitored. As such, failing to meet these requirements can result in penalties and reputational damage.

However, voice surveillance is also an important part in risk management, because it helps to identify unauthorized disclosures and misleading information. Early detection of these issues is key because they can reduce legal liability and reputational damage.

Challenges in Voice Data Archiving

Data capture

The most obvious challenge associated with regulatory voice capture is simply in capturing and storing the voice data. At such high volumes, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. But that increases the risk of non-compliance.

This issue affected JP Morgan, who was fined $200 million by the CTFC in 2024. Between 2014 and 2021, billions of order messages (including phone calls) were missed from data capture, resulting in severe surveillance gaps. This was due to a system operating error. 

Transcription accuracy

Another challenge affecting secure voice archiving is transcription accuracy. It would be impossible to transcribe the hundreds, or even thousands of voice communications manually – a real inefficient use of resources. Naturally, firms rely on automated software to do the heavy lifting, but this is not always accurate. Unfortunately, accuracy is a key part of voice compliance monitoring for financial services, so you can’t really afford to get it wrong.

One firm that experienced this was Goldman Sachs, who were fined $5.5 million in August 2023 for VCM failings. The transcriptions of recorded calls were inaccurate and incomplete, undermining regulators’ ability to audit trades and market conduct.

Compliance risks

Finally, firms are also dealing with drawing conclusions from the data, including detecting compliance risks. One such risk is insider trading, which three British firms failed to supervise through voice communication monitoring, leading to over £4.7 million in fines in 2022.

It therefore seems that voice surveillance could be the missing piece for compliant communications at some firms.

Mark Steward, Executive Director of Enforcement and Market Oversight at the FCA, commented:

“Oversight of our markets is a regulated partnership between the FCA and market participants and so gaps or holes in a firm’s ability to monitor and detect abusive trading poses direct risks to market integrity. This case is another example of the FCA’s determination to ensure firms prioritize market integrity and the maintenance of high standards of compliance”

Global Relay can help you with VCM: here’s how

With a dedicated Voice Surveillance product, Global Relay helps firms meet their VCM demands. Built on a robust AI program, our voice-to-text transcription solution captures and monitors voice communication data with accuracy, speed, and consistency.

With in-built sentiment analysis, you can trigger automatic analysis for at-risk keywords and phrases. With violations flagged for attention, reviewers can focus their time where risk has been identified.

Moreover, the platform recognizes complex speech patterns in real-time, including technical language, slang, and accents. For increased accuracy, background noise is identified and disregarded.

Why not test out Global Relay’s AI voice surveillance system?

What are the benefits of Global Relay’s VCM?

With experience working directly with some of the world’s most well-known regulators, Global Relay ensures that your voice records are easily auditable for regulatory reviews. We can support you in meeting global requirements, from MAR, to MiFID II and SEC Rules.

Plus, our audio transcription plays a critical part in detecting high-risk behaviours, such as misconduct or fraud. With automatic analysis and inline transcription, we can support proactive voice surveillance as well as historical investigation.

Finally, thanks to the AI-driven nature of our voice data archiving solutions, you can benefit from streamlined and efficient visibility beyond compliance.

Mastering Voice Compliance Monitoring is key

With hundreds of thousands of customer service calls, trading conversations, and other communications requiring oversight each year, firms should be prioritizing their voice compliance monitoring.

Overcome data capture, transcription, storage and compliance challenges by partnering with Global Relay to identify red flags early and get ahead of regulatory fall-out. As part of your wider risk management strategy, firms tend to excel with monitoring their written messages, documents, and records. But, compliance voice analytics tools must not be overlooked.

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