Copytalk
Enterprise-Grade Transcription Service for Superior Compliance

In the world of corporate finance, compliance is vital. Particularly in the wealth management and financial services industry, documenting conversations between advisors and clients is required by law. Whether prospecting or on boarding a client, or changing portfolios or strategies, each meet-ing must be memorialized to justify the reason behind it. Speech is easy enough to record, but what about getting that data down in writing? Poor documentation is a major factor in fines against enterprises these days. Furthermore, the vulnerabilities of popular speech-to-text software include the solution providers themselves, who reserve the right to mine user data in violation of privacy. Should companies really put their faith—and millions of dollars in compliance liability — on the line for an unsecured, online subscription service that has at least a 15 percent error rate?

No! The answer is plain and simple, especially since there is a much better alternative: Copytalk, a leading transcription service engineered to meet the financial service industry’s uniquely rigorous standards of accuracy, privacy, and efficiency in the recording of dictated client-meeting notes and the preparation & delivery of transcriptions. All of Copytalk’s transcriptions are prepared by live, U.S. facilities-based transcriptionists working at locked-down workstations within one of Copy-talk’s securely managed facilities. These strict protocols, rare in the industry, ensure security, pri-vacy, and quality control to meet the broad need for documentation. In conversation with CIO Ap-plications, Maree Moscati, CEO of Copytalk, shares her insights on how her company is changing the game for FinTech companies in addressing their meeting documentation compliance criteria.

Could you walk us through what Copytalk is and your background?

We are a mobile transcription company that caters primarily to regulated industries—mainly in the financial services, and legal fields. Copytalk started as a simple process where we would have live transcriptionists, all based here in the U.S., in a controlled and monitored facility, working on our equipment. Since then, Copytalk has just celebrated our 20th anniversary and now has three offices across the country, with our own in-house IT and development team.

Tell us about your business and how you would typically work with clients

We work either with B2B or B2C clients. B2B involves us engaging with somebody in the C suite or procurement within an organization.We start the process by entering into a contractual agree-ment based on the budgetary aspects and the particular enterprise’s needs. Once we have all of the documentation down, including their specific guidelines, we set those parameters up front and establish what the firm wants.

Once we have all of that in place, we establish enterprise-level pricing, depending on the en-gagement and the opportunity vailable. We also establish some guidelines on security and priva-cy protocols for that particular enterprise. We offer several webinars with some Q&A sessions to accommodate their teams for an advisor who wants to come on board. They simply sign up under a promo code, which is the special pricing for their firm. Then, we have account execs for specific accounts who give the client individual tutorials, or we will do group tutorials — whatever training they feel that they need. We also offer training webinar videos that they can view and learn from at their leisure.

We also offer them (during business hours) the opportunity to work with our customer service team if they have any issues in getting logged on. There is no software download; it is as simple as picking up your phone and leaving a voicemail. Once you have your account set up, we just need a couple of specific data points, i.e., our key identifiers, because our transcriptionists have no knowledge of whom they are working for and on what. That’s all coded through a personal identi-fication number. So transcriptionists have no access to know who the clients are, only the contents of an individual dictation. Once they have all that, clients are ready to utilize our services, which is an unlimited service for a flat monthly price.

How has your track record been with clients in the past? How have these interactions helped describe your future trajectory and roadmap?

One of our clients came on board with us because they were having thorough compliance issues with advisors not taking good/sufficient amount of notes, i.e., not keeping good documentation. And through some audits, they had some very heavy fines, one of which was failure to supervise. The price went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were looking for a solution where they could have a more efficient and effective way to record their meeting notes. We set up an enterprise agreement with them which in the last 7 years has helped boost their audit scores to about 99 percent, which is a huge improvement. For the cost of what they pay Copytalk for their advisors to use our service, it saved them literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and oversight. So they’re quite pleased. We have taken the feedback from clients such as these and created a couple of new dictation guides, which allows either an enterprise or an individual to create their own templateto ensure they dictate notes which meet their specific internal needs. Clients can do that right on their app, and it gives them consistency in the value of the service we provide.

About 18 months ago, we developed what we call the Copytalker. It is an API that sits either in a CRM or within an advisor workstation dashboard. With it, you can dictate your notes at the push of a button on your phone/computer, which helps keep everything simple. We also offer live closed captioning in the language of your choice, and are currently in the process of providing transcription services in non-English languages as well.