How AI can improve financial advice compliance

The pressure on financial advisers to demonstrate the quality and compliance of their advice is a matter of regulatory compliance and of protecting clients’ financial wellbeing. Since Consumer Duty came into force, the FCA has placed emphasis on firms using data to identify, monitor and confirm that customer outcomes are consistent with the Duty.

Ongoing advice providers face particular scrutiny while the industry awaits the FCA’s review of 20 of the largest advice firms. The regulator is considering how many clients were due a review and how many actually received one.

At the Artificial Intelligence in Financial Advice conference, Recordsure’s Chief Technology Officer Kit Ruparel and Chief Product and Commercial Officer Garry Evans explained how Recordsure’s established AI solution can help businesses evidence advice reviews, onboarding and ongoing servicing. The discussion covered long-standing capabilities used by firms for over 12 years and newer developments such as AI meeting notes.

The pertinence of this issue is pressing for ongoing advice providers, because the review findings will test whether firms can validate that customers received the service they were due. The conference discussion showed that efficient evidencing and advice reviews are practical hurdles, not abstract topics.

Full oversight of customer conversations

An accurate record of client and adviser conversations is central to advice oversight, whether those conversations happen in person or remotely. Recordsure’s Capture app creates a secure, patented record of spoken interactions and can record offline when no internet connection is available.

Once captured, hundreds or thousands of hours of conversations can be reviewed using AI, which would otherwise require a major increase in human resource. Recordsure’s Document Intelligence can score and assess conversations so QA teams can focus on the conversations where potential problems have been identified.

Review your back-book and prevent future issues

Document Intelligence provides an automated approach to ongoing servicing validation. It has checked over one million years of ongoing advice collectively, equating to billions of pounds in ongoing service charges.

Recordsure distinguishes this approach from generative AI tools that create content. Its technology uses traditional and predictive artificial intelligence to understand data so firms can use information efficiently, meet regulatory standards and support better customer outcomes.

Transform customer oversight for assets under advice

For over a decade, Document Intelligence has supported financial services firms in day-to-day activities ranging from ongoing servicing to full suitability checking. It has been trained by specialist teams over millions of data points and thousands of cases for use by tier 1 banks and the UK government.

• Documents, including transcripts from conversations recorded by Capture, are ingested automatically from practice management systems such as intelliflo, Xplan or SharePoint.
• Users can browse documents quickly in the Document Intelligence portal without downloading them.
• The system reads a document to establish whether it is a fact find, suitability report or another relevant document type.
• The AI reads document content to identify the issue date, allowing the system to build a timeline of events.
• Once document type and date are identified, the system can automate checking of key documents on file for every service period across 100% of cases.
• Service periods without corresponding documentation can be identified for immediate consideration for redress.
• A deeper service provision check can organise relevant content from the whole case into summary themes, such as customer interaction evidence or conclusion evidence.

These summary themes can display sections of documents, interview dates, fact find completion, product calculator results, research documents and areas that show advice was provided.

The process also lets users consider service periods, documentation gaps and evidence from across the entire case without downloading files from the portal. This gives QA teams a fuller picture of customer circumstances and the basis for advice.

Understand your full customer timeline for accurate outcomes

Document Intelligence can rapidly build a customer advice timeline and provide the information a firm needs to make an outcome judgement. It can also be configured with different system and AI model settings for full suitability review checking.

The system does not pass data to OpenAI or third parties. Information stays within the UK Microsoft Azure tenancy provided for clients.

Reduce client handling times

Recordsure’s team addressed ongoing advice service charge issues for tier 1 wealth managers in Australia. Document Intelligence processed and analysed over ninety million documents and files, spanning approximately one million years of client advice history and totalling more than £1 billion in client advice fees.

The work also helped the firm reduce its case handling time by over 80%, showing how a document-led oversight model can support large-scale review activity.