ASIC plan for AI snoops on insurance calls strains hearing

Australia's financial watchdog might be dreaming of the day when call centre surveillance software automatically catches crooked insurance sales staff. But there's still a way to go before AI-powered voice analytics can decipher the verbage that bubbles out of a sales boiler room. That's the reality check bowled up to regulators and industry rapidly spitballing prototypes of new regtech solutions as banks, insurers and auditors all trying to find ways to automatically detect bad behaviour without creating a profit sapping compliance cost sinkhole in the process. At a closely watched regtech forum late last month, ASIC outlined its findings from a trial of voice analytics software applied to a sample of life insurance sales calls. With a freshly sharpened set of teeth, the watchdog says it sees "great potential" in using voice analytics to automatically identify instances of potential misconduct in life insurance sales calls - but there's a catch.