Surveillance spends to rise as regulators clamp down

The need for better capture, the drive for surveillance of broader populations and the need to apply more sophisticated technologies to existing datasets to improve surveillance effectiveness all imply increased spending on surveillance over the next few years.

More significantly, it implies increased investment simply in establishing the right levels of coverage of regulated employees – and, sure enough, 81% of Deep Dive participants believe that their bank will increase investment in surveillance over the next three years.

There will also have to be investment in new tools. Full coverage means a huge jump in the volume of communications surveilled, as more people, more markets, and more types of comms channel (especially video-based collaboration tools), have to be captured and analysed.

“Relying on teams of people and traditional sampling for these new channels would be both expensive and ineffective,” says Stacey English, Director of Market Intelligence, Theta Lake. “To cope with the volumes, but also to be able to alert surveillance analysts to potential misuse of video and whiteboarding, banks will need to look at AI-based solutions that can, for example, detect financial documents on screen without needing an audio reference.”

Banks are already on this path. More than half of attendees (56%) say that they are actively moving towards AI and more advanced automation tools, with another 37% doing so selectively for key parts of the business.

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