Echo Cancellation™ is an included feature of the Smarsh Enterprise Supervision application

Platform intelligence

This summer Smarsh launched Echo Cancellation™ for Microsoft Exchange. This is a feature of Enterprise Supervision that leverages artificial intelligence to help supervision teams conduct their review work more efficiently. Today we announce the expansion of this offering to include Office 365 email.

Echo Cancellation™ is just one of many innovations from Smarsh that contributes to the Connected Suite’s platform intelligence.

Smarsh has invested in a variety of unique technologies that enable this intelligence. These include the platform’s cloud-native, scalable architecture, a processing pipeline that leverages patented context preservation capabilities for all communications and a set of specialized, open APIs.

The persistent challenge of false positives

FINRA rule 3110 requires firms to supervise all electronic communications generated by their regulated employees. For larger financial institutions, this amounts to an enormous volume of content.

One of the biggest challenges with today’s supervision systems is separating the real risk from the ‘noise’. Many systems rely exclusively on a lexical approach to risk identification. This approach can be suitable for a limited set of risk scenarios. In most cases, however, supervision systems lack the ability to consistently filter out less precise matches, creating a large volume of irrelevant alerts. Review teams are then required to sift through a vast and often unmanageable number of false positives to get to relevant and targeted content.

Why did we develop Echo Cancellation™?

Despite the explosion in collaboration and IM communications, the bulk of today’s communications content is still email-based.

When it comes to email content, many false positives are created by the everyday use of email, which generates noise in the supervision review system.

Email tools append the original message into the body of someone’s email when they reply to or forward that original message. This causes a supervision hit from one message to get copied and repeated throughout many messages, each creating individual triggers in the supervision system. It is inevitable that duplicative messages will make their way into supervision queues, causing reviewers to be overburdened and less efficient. This has a significant and negative impact on the workload of supervision teams and is a problem we wanted to solve.

The Smarsh Enterprise Supervision application offers a range of capabilities to help manage noise. However, to augment this inventory of capabilities, we have taken steps to tackle the issue of repetitive copies head-on.

Our product team worked closely with our financial services clients to develop the Echo Cancellation™ feature. We invested resources in this so we could empower supervision teams to conduct their work more efficiently. Our aim was to save our customers valuable time and money and to reduce their compliance risk.

What is Echo Cancellation?

The Smarsh Echo Cancellation™ feature helps to reduce your supervision costs and improve the productivity of your review team. It introduces artificial intelligence to the supervision system and enables smarter review of email content.

Echo Cancellation™ uses an algorithm that can analyze the conditions of an alert and make intelligent decisions to identify false positives. It then subordinates the review of these false positives within your queues. This functionality can be controlled at a policy level so your supervision team can configure review of the echoed messages as it suits each use case. This frees up time and effort for them to focus instead on messages that pose real risk.

Echo Cancellation™ makes the review process significantly faster and more efficient, resulting in valuable time and cost savings to your organization.

Successful pilot program results

Before releasing our Echo Cancellation feature for general availability, Smarsh undertook a thorough pilot program of this capability. We partnered with a key, global financial services customer to observe and validate that the software operated as intended.

This pilot program demonstrated a 20% reduction in items requiring review, with 100% precision. ‘Precision’ refers to the model's ability to identify true positives (identifying an echo as an echo) without creating false positives (identifying non-echoes as an echo).

For more information about the results of this pilot program and how Echo Cancellation™ works, click here to read our Echo Cancellation Solution Brief.

Continued investment in AI at Smarsh

Echo Cancellation™ is one of many features that Smarsh is developing to make Enterprise Supervision a more intelligent data platform. Our product and development teams are constantly investing in enhancements to our Connected Suite of products to help our customers conduct their work faster and more effectively.

For more information about our Enterprise Supervision product, check out our Enterprise Supervision web page.

For full details about Echo Cancellation™, or to book a demo, please contact our sales team.