NRI announces successful integration of AI technology into Mizuho Securities’ call monitoring operations

Artificial intelligence continues to make its way through the financial services industry, with compliance and fraud detection being among the areas where AI technologies are increasingly adopted. Underlining this trend, Nomura Research Institute Ltd (TYO:4307) announced earlier this week the successful integration of new technology into the call monitoring operations of Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. The integration was completed last month following a proof of concept stage, NRI explains.

The integration combines NRI’s voice recognition and AI technologies in order to optimize Mizuho’s processes for monitoring and analyzing communication between investors and sales representatives, which are tracked for both compliance purposes and better customer care.

The voice recognition and AI-enabled systems that have been implemented are developed from NRI’s “TRAINA VOICE Digest” and customized to suit Mizuho’s specific needs. The system learns from a collection of conversation data, using summary rules of conversations and monitoring checklist/guideline for machine learning. At the end of the process the system extracts and shows the parts of conversations that need to be monitored.

As part of the initial push to optimize this monitoring process, Mizuho chose NRI to conduct PoC at the end of 2016. NRI’s system converted the phone conversations into texts with voice recognition technology, analyzed the texts with AI, and extracted essence to be monitored. The result of the PoC showed that NRI’s system achieved significant reduction in monitoring time, and Mizuho decided to implement the system officially.

“Voice recognition is the latest component in a string of demand for AI technology integration that NRI is seeing from some of the most prominent banks in the world,” says Masaaki Yamazaki, Managing Director of NRI. “Demand continues to increase for AI solutions to traditional financial services operations, and NRI works to make sure that we are at the forefront of research and application of AI for the industry.”

In September this year, SoftBank Group Corp (TYO:9984) and Mizuho Bank announced the launch of J.Score, a joint venture that aims to offer loans tailored to the specific needs and life style of each consumer. The new service decides on consumer loans based on an AI score. In fact, an AI technology will be responsible for the calculation and analysis of the score. The AI score will help J.Score determine the most appropriate interest rates and maximum amount of money to be provided to each customer.