WiseWorks AI, a communications intelligence platform, has secured a £1 million investment to build a one-stop solution for financial institutions to analyse surging virtual communications for compliance and to automate everyday tasks.
The round was led by Veridian Ventures, with investment from funds including Silicon Valley-based R42, SyndicateRoom’s Super Angel fund, and Istcapital, joining initial investors Founders Factory.
The funding will be used to expand the team and accelerate product development.
WiseWorks is backed by serial entrepreneur and AI veteran Dr Ronjon Nag, founder of R42, who has founded and advised speech recognition companies sold to Motorola, RIM/Blackberry and Apple.
The startup is hoping to help regulated firms such as financial institutions, which are required by Financial Conduct Authority regulations to record and keep relevant communications for up to seven years.
WiseWorks is already gaining traction among the world’s largest banks, with trials with individual users at Tier 1 institutions. The company is also creating a product for consumers facing similar challenges.
The startup was founded by Teoman Gonenc and Dwane van der Sluis, who between them have decades of experience in investment banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, as well as natural language processing (NLP) scale ups like Signal AI.
With the pandemic giving rise to remote working among staff, many institutions are struggling to properly contain the explosion of virtual communications with existing manual processes. A recent EY survey of 21 European banks found a disproportionate amount of time is currently being spent on compliance activities that could be automated such as monitoring and surveillance.
Tackling the problem, WiseWorks has built a first-of-its-kind product that captures visual, acoustic, and linguistic cues from virtual communications, to enable previously out-of-reach use cases ranging from prevention of misleading advice, to continuous fact finding for suitability and business development purposes.
“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,” said CEO Gonenc (pictured).
“Some firms are also realising 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 Nag added: “Having worked in speech recognition for 30 years, we can see the potential of WiseWorks’ application to transform the way financial institutions monitor and analyse 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.”