WiseWorks AI, the communications intelligence platform, has acquired a $1.2 million investment in order to develop a comprehensive solution for financial institutions to analyze surging virtual communications for compliance and to automate routine tasks.
The oversubscribed investment round has been led by Veridian Ventures, with contributions from funds such as Silicon Valley’s R42, SyndicateRoom’s Super Angel fund, and Istcapital, joining early investors Founders Factory. The proceeds will be channeled towards expanding the professional team and supporting product development.
WiseWorks is reportedly backed by serial entrepreneur and AI vet Dr. Ronjon Nag, founder of R42, who has established and advised speech recognition firms sold to Motorola, RIM/Blackberry, and Apple.
The startup is now hoping to assist regulated companies including financial institutions, which are required by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulations to record and keep communications for up to 7 years.
With the COVID-19 pandemic giving rise to remote working among staff members, many institutions are currently struggling to contain the rise of virtual communications with outdated manual processes.
An EY survey of 21 European banking institutions revealed there was a disproportionate amount of time being spent on compliance-related activities that could be automated like monitoring and surveillance.
Addressing the issue, WiseWorks has created (what it claims to be) a “first-of-its-kind” product that captures visual, acoustic, and linguistic cues from virtual communications, to enable previously “out-of-reach” use-cases such as prevention of misleading advice, to continuous fact finding for suitability / business development purposes.
Teoman Gonenc, WiseWorks co-founder and CEO, stated:
“With the rise of remote working, financial institutions are struggling to deal with the sheer level of virtual communications they must analyse for regulatory purposes. Some firms are also realizing that this is a massive opportunity to get to know their clients better. Our technology helps them achieve these objectives in a way that was not previously possible. The new funding will help us do this at a greater scale.”
Dr. Ronjon Nag, Founder & President at R42, remarked:
“Having worked in speech recognition for 30 years, we can see the potential of WiseWorks’ application to transform the way financial institutions monitor and analyze virtual communications and handle costly and time-intensive activities. With such an accomplished team behind the business, we’re excited to see great things WiseWorks will undoubtedly achieve in the coming years.”
WiseWorks is gaining traction among large banks, with trials with individual users at Tier 1 institutions. The firm is also developing a product for consumers facing similar challenges.
The startup was established by Teoman Gonenc and Dwane van der Sluis, who between them have considerable experience working at investment banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, as well as natural language processing (NLP) scale ups such as Signal AI.