Company empowers advisor video posts to social networks while ensuring full compliance in a fraction of normal review time

Its pre-trained machine learning model distinguishes between different content categories and flags objectionable posts

Hearsay Systems, the trusted leader in compliant digital communications that deliver an authentic, human-client experience for the financial services industry, today announced the release of the first AI-powered solution to dramatically reduce the time and effort associated with reviewing videos financial advisors post across their social channels. This new, highly scalable solution is a first for the financial services industry. It allows users to publish video content faster by leveraging AI to detect inappropriate material and an automated speech-to-text lexicon review to ensure that all videos are in full compliance with industry standards before they are posted. Hearsay also unveiled a new feature that adds compliance support for direct messages sent through Instagram. These advances make it easier and more efficient than ever for advisors to use digital channels to connect with clients and prospects.

Over the course of the pandemic, video has emerged as an important medium used by financial representatives to showcase who they are and what it’s like to work with them. According to Hearsay’s 2021 Finserv Compliance Benchmark Report, video-centric channels, such as Instagram and YouTube, are the platforms advisors are most interested in adopting because of their “show, not tell” functionality. Conversely, the compliance risks and costs associated with video are much higher due to the inclusion of spoken words, actions, backgrounds, and other images that are much harder to monitor. The increased burden on compliance teams to manually review videos leads many firms to prohibit video, or from an advisor’s perspective, content creation efforts can be stifled by a lengthy review process.

Despite limitations on video compliance to date, 53% of Hearsay System’s global customers across all lines of business— property & casualty, life insurance, and wealth and asset management— published more than 360,000 videos on the platform so far this year. The videos were shared on social networks by agents and advisors to engage their customer bases and prospects. With Hearsay’s broadened video support, agents and advisors can create and upload even more original video or video messages for their social pages without overburdening their compliance teams.

“Video is a part of everyday life for millions of Americans, and if advisors want to reach clients and prospects where they are, it must be a part of their digital communications strategy,” said Iain Duke-Richardet, VP of Compliance Strategy at Hearsay Systems. “The challenge to date has been how to capitalize on the highly authentic, personalized benefits of video while addressing the additional monitoring challenges, as compared to a typical social post or text message. Hearsay solves this issue with its new intelligent compliance prediction solution, which surfaces problematic content and flags it for human review. This saves compliance personnel massive amounts of time and reduces organizational risk while still allowing advisors to maximize video’s potential.”

How It Works

Hearsay added artificial intelligence-powered video compliance pre-review capabilities to its video solution for posts created by agents and advisors on Hearsay Social. Visual video content is analyzed by a pre-trained machine learning model to identify inappropriate images across different content categories like nudity, violence, visually disturbing content, and rude gestures.

In addition to the already implemented lexicon violation review for video body texts, video titles, and caption files, Hearsay Social is now able to automatically generate an audio transcript which can be pre-reviewed for lexicon infractions as well.

These new, industry-leading capabilities are not intended to replace human-led supervision, but rather to assist compliance teams by pointing out textual and visual content-related violations and help streamline the compliance pre-review process. In the end, compliance personnel still decide whether to approve or deny a video post with the help of the AI-driven content review results and lexicon review alerts. This allows firms to monitor videos far more efficiently and to do so at scale.

In addition to the AI-powered video compliance pre-review solution, Hearsay has added compliance support for Instagram direct messages on top of its existing support for Facebook and LinkedIn direct messages. This ensures 1:1 interactions are supervised while advisors leverage the Instagram channel. Once enabled, the feature detects Instagram business account direct messages, applies supervision rules, and routes to archive. It is yet another example of Hearsay’s commitment to innovation and empowering advisors to use the latest technologies to their advantage without risk.

To learn more about Hearsay Systems and video support, please watch our latest webinar, https://www.hearsaysystems.com/resource/show-dont-tell-evolution-video-social-webinar, or visit www.hearsaysystems.com.