ASIC notes voice analytics potential for life insurance

In his opening address at the ASIC Regtech Voice Analytics Symposium in Melbourne yesterday, Mr Shipton pointed to ASIC’s report from August 2018 into direct life insurance which found that sales practices and product design were leading to poor consumer outcome.

“As I said at the time, life insurance is a long-term product, but cancellation rates and poor claim outcomes showed that Australians were being sold products they didn’t want, couldn’t afford, or didn’t perform as they expected,” he said.

Mr Shipton said he could see a future where artificial intelligence including machine learning, text analytics, voice analytics, and other technologies are a seamless component of financial services firms’ business models.

“A future where firms can record, store and analyse all communications with consumers using these tools,” he said.

“This would provide firms with near to real-time insights, as well as after-the-fact insights on quality and compliance.

“We believe this can in turn aid strategic business insight analysis and training and development, and improve risk and compliance outcomes at scale – with greater efficiency and at a reduced cost.”

The event is the third event in ASIC’s Regtech Initiatives series of events. The first event addressed regtech’s potential in identifying potential misconduct across promotional material from financial, credit and lending services.

The second event addressed the capacity for regtech to improve financial advice standards by using machine learning technologies to quickly identify poor financial advice from documents and other information sources.

Adrian Flores

Adrian Flores is a deputy editor at Momentum Media, focusing mainly on banking, wealth management and financial services. He has also written for Public Accountant, Accountants Daily and The CEO Magazine.

You can contact him on [email protected].