Automatic language processing solutions are currently used in many sectors, including trading. This is notably the case of Bertin IT’s MediaSpeech®, which has been adopted by Crédit Agricole CIB to facilitate the day-to-day supervision and analysis of the conversations of more than 500 traders and salespeople in French and English.

Bertin IT, a subsidiary of CNIM Group, discussed the deployment of its MediaSpeech® solution in the Paris and London trading rooms of Crédit Agricole CIB, the corporate and investment bank of the Crédit Agricole Group. This deployment could eventually be extended to the French bank’s American and Asian trading rooms.

With the entry into force of the MAD II / MAR regulation on July 3, 2016, coupled with the entry into force in early 2018 of the MIFID II / MIFIR regulation, marked by an increase in regulatory requirements, Crédit Agricole CIB decided to equip itself with a solution to enable the transcription of telephone conversations in its trading rooms.

Such a technological solution makes it possible to optimise existing processes that essentially consisted of listening to the conversations of traders and salespeople on the basis of random sampling in order to verify compliance. An activity which, when carried out in a traditional way, remains very time-consuming. After several proofs of concept, Bertin IT’s MediaSpeech® solution was finally chosen.

A multilingual voice transcription solution, MediaSpeech® converts audio tracks into searchable text transcripts for indexing, searching and analyzing audio and video sources and telecommunications. Thanks to the deep learning neural networks (or deep learning) that are very present in today’s artificial intelligence systems, MediaSpeech® is based on an extremely fine modeling of the acoustic space, which is robust to speaker variability (rate, accents, etc.) and sound conditions, and thus offers even more accurate and faster transcription.

“MediaSpeech® is a direct language transcription technology that combines technological excellence and functional flexibility that is unique on the market,” said Ariane Nabeth Halber, Director of Speech Solutions at Bertin IT. “Its ability to run in SaaS as well as on site, and to manage batch files and real-time audio streams in all the languages in the catalogue, is an undeniable asset. In addition, the high accuracy of the engine has won numerous customer benchmarks, both against solutions from large US companies and against solutions from local vendors.

To meet the technological challenge posed by Crédit Agricole CIB, Bertin IT had to adapt its solution to the specific speech data in the trading rooms, where traders use a very specific vocabulary, a mix of French and English. The immense diversity of accents also had to be taken into account.

The results of these efforts are convincing since, according to Berlin IT, the transcription fee is in the order of 80 to 85% for a relatively reasonable cost per user. The volume of conversations monitored has increased fivefold and is expected to increase significantly in the future.

After these initial deployments, the solution will be extended to other languages and probably to other geographical areas, including Crédit Agricole CIB’s US and Asian trading rooms. At the same time, the bank and Bertin IT are working together on new projects related to the use of voice.

“Originally developed by Vecsys, a company acquired by Bertin in 2011, MediaSpeech® was initially dedicated to applications related to Defence and Security,” said Yves Rochereau, CEO of Bertin IT. “Today, MediaSpeech® addresses demanding markets, such as media groups, audiovisual monitoring companies, contact centres and trading rooms of major banks, which use it to index, search and analyse audio and video content for monitoring, alerting and information purposes or to comply with banking regulations, as in the case of Crédit Agricole CIB”.

Bertin IT is positioned as a French tech in the fields of Cyber Security and Cyber Intelligence, and more specifically strategic intelligence, with two flagship products: AMI Enterprise Intelligence and MediaSpeech®, which have already been adopted by major industrial accounts and public bodies in France.

Translated from Transcription : comment Bertin IT accompagne Crédit Agricole CIB pour renforcer la conformité de ses salles de marché