Fano Labs Receives Fintech Grand Award - HK ICT Awards 2020

Fano Labs, an AI company specialized in speech recognition, natural language processing and voice biometrics technologies, recently received the Grand Award of Hong Kong ICT Awards 2020: Fintech Award, and Gold Award of the Regulatory Technology and Risk Management stream, with their solution “Callinter, an Artificial Intelligence Compliance Assurance System”.

Applying advanced AI technologies, Fano Labs has developed a smart speech analytics system, Callinter, for customers in the finance sector. Callinter can greatly enhance capability in general management, risk management and business development of banks, insurance companies and regulatory bodies. With the technologies of speech recognition and natural language processing, Callinter helps in ensuring compliance by analysing calls in full, transcribing all calls into text and uncover any potential risk and/or compliance issues for easier tracking, immediate handling and training. It doesn’t only  benefit customer services, but also business development.

Over the past two decades, governments across the globe have gradually tightened the regulations over financial institutes to better protect citizens’ & investors’ wealth. Nowadays if you as an ordinary consumer visits a bank to buy a regulated investment product, the bank’s relationship manager (RM) will have to explain all the risks disclosure statements to you and ensure that you clearly understand the risks, before the transaction can be made. If an RM fails to do so and the consumer ended up losing money from that investment product, the bank will have to compensate the consumer for the losses and face potential penalty by the regulators. As a result, each of such sales recordings is recorded and the bank has to manually listen to a portion of such recordings to ensure that their RM did not breach the compliance rules. Not only that such practices incur heavy cost to the banks, which would likely become higher transaction fees for consumers, but there are still a huge portion of recordings which are not examined which might carry potential risk.

“We have been working with a few banks lately to automate these compliance check with our new speech analytics product, Callinter”, said Dr. Wen, co-founder and CEO of Fano Labs, “Basically we use AI technologies to automatically analyze 100% of those sales recordings, identify the recordings where there might be a potential compliance breach, and present them to the bank’s compliance managers for follow-ups. With this system, our bank customers can save up to 70%-80% of manpower to fulfill such compliance requirements.”

The judging panel of HKITC Awards commented that, “A veteran of the HKICT Awards, having won the Grand Award of Smart Business in 2018, Fano came back this year with a new service called Callinter to join the Fintech Awards. ...Callinter stood out as it is able to handle mixed languages with a high degree of accuracy. This reduces the risk of huge fines, lawsuits and other compliance issues.”

As a spin-off from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and a Designated Local Research Institute (DLRI) of Hong Kong SAR. Fano Labs is backed by HKU, Hong Kong Science & Technology Park, Horizons Ventures, Saltagen Ventures, Animoca Brands, Mr. Antony Leung (former Financial Secretary of the Hong Kong SAR), and Alibaba Entrepreneurship Funds.

Fano Labs develops voice biometrics, speech recognition, and natural language processing technologies for ASEAN and MENA languages, such as Cantonese, Thai, Bahasa, Singapore English, and Arabic, among others. Fano Labs helps governments and enterprises automate their customer services, analyse their recordings for compliance check, and identify potential churns in customer service calls. As of today, Fano Labs’s technologies have been adopted by over a dozen government departments and commercial enterprises from the banking, telecom, airline, and utilities sectors.