There's a lot of junk in today's modern business communications.
Deals of the Day, spurious research papers, sales solicitations, job vacancies: millions of useless - yet potentially harmful - emails, texts, and messages landing every day.
For regulated businesses, such as banks, insurance companies, and legal firms, only a minority of electronic communications breach compliance rules or, worse still, are an attempt to commit a cyber crime.
Sifting out the sinister from the innocuous is a constant and expensive business - expert, highly-paid human reviewers employed by the thousand to scroll through manually looking for the threats.
False positives - those unwanted but innocent communications that can be safely ignored - clog up the system and waste valuable time and money. Deploying tools that can automatically detect, tag, and remove false positives can reduce that inefficiency by up to 98% and, just as significantly, help identify more risk.
All that is needed is a technology partner with the solution and the expertise to make it happen.
"Regulated businesses must police themselves in order to minimise any inadvertent breaching of strict rules around what can and cannot be said in an electronic communication - the reviewers on whom that depends need to be fishing for risk in a pool that is as small and as potentially-yielding as possible," says Chris Stapenhurst, Senior Principal Product Manager at leading data management experts Veritas, whose discovery, surveillance, and file analysis products can help achieve that.
"A compliance team might be working super-fast and doing a great job but, if all it is being served up is garbage, it isn't going to lower risk for the firm. It's not going to find regulatory violations; it's just going through the motions.
"Deploying pre-programmed models to proactively identify junk can quickly reduce the number of communications which warrant closer scrutiny."
Of course, the challenge has intensified due to the proliferation of omnichannel unified communication systems. Communications that were once voice-only are now exchanged via email, SMS, and third-party messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Slack and others.
UC platform providers - as well as end user organisations - must therefore ensure they can deploy as much technological support as possible to minimize the impact.
The Veritas solution - which integrates seamlessly with customers' existing communication stacks - features a so-called 'exclusion' mechanism and an 'allow' list which, for example, understands that highly-charged words such as 'prohibited' or 'unauthorized' that may appear in a firm's standard legal disclaimer on all of its electronic communications are not, in fact, cause for concern.
The solution also has pre-built, out-of-the-box policies to help identify seemingly-sinister yet actually risk-free email content such as subject lines, subscription targeting, and out of office replies. Another feature looks at headers for automatically generated e-mail by Microsoft and so identifies things like read receipts which can then be automatically excluded from any content requiring human review.
Uniquely - as well as issuing regular quarterly policy updates - the Veritas AI system is constantly 'trained' by end user reviewer activity, and updated daily to reflect changes to customers' own ever-evolving lexicon of sinister or innocuous words and phrases.
"It all ensures a desired layered approach to identifying false positives and exclusions," says Stapenhurst.
"Our quarterly classification updates are co-developed with customers, and benefit from their own ongoing learning. We issue between two and 10 new policy updates every quarter so, even if the customer does nothing in-house, they know that their systems are staying up to date."
The positive impact of deploying the Veritas solution can be game-changing.
"We recently worked with a bank that had 40 human reviewers looking at electronic communications non-stop all day," says Stapenhurst.
"Now they have reduced that number down to just four 'super-surveillance' reviewers that are fully-focused on a relatively tiny data set of communications within which all of the potential risk of regulatory non-compliance exists. That's not only a huge saving on resource, it's also a significant enhancement to the bank's ability to prevent a breach of the rules and, in turn, reduce its exposure to resulting fines and penalties. That's a win, win, win right there."
To learn more about how Veritas can help your and your customers' businesses work smarter, click here.