The Fonetic recordkeeping solution, first implemented four years ago at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), is the first and only fully-functional Dodd-Frank and MiFID Trading Recordkeeping Compliance Solution available that enables financial institutions to meet these regulatory compliance requirements today.

Fonetic's global launch coincides with the signing of an agreement with The Santander Group, one of the world's largest banks in terms of market capitalization, which has implemented Fonetic's solution in five languages across seven of its major international trading rooms throughout Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia. The Santander Group chose Fonetic's solution to meet the April 2014 Dodd-Frank record keeping compliance deadline for financial institutions conducting more than $3 billion in transactions.

Designed to create more transparency and accountability, the current Dodd-Frank Act in North America, and future MiFID II Act in Europe, will bring significant changes to existing global regulatory frameworks. The Dodd-Frank Act places rigorous recordkeeping compliance obligations on financial institutions, which must be able to provide regulators with all voice, email and instant message interactions related to a single operation, such as a SWAPS or derivative trade, or any of its traders, in a maximum 72-hour timeframe. With traders conducting millions of high volume trades every minute, the challenge for trading floors to achieve full compliance before the April 2014 deadline has been vast.

Bernt Ostergaard, Service Director at Quocirca, the global research and analyst firm, said, "Clearly, the large financial institutions need to speed up their compliance processes work to meet the aggressive Dodd-Frank deadlines. But beyond compliance, the linguistics-based ability to near real-time monitor trading over phone, email and chat will improve their ability to identify and thwart rogue transactions."

Fonetic's Trading Recordkeeping Compliance Solution employs complex linguistics-based speech analytics software, powered by the Nuance voice recognition technology, to both proactively prevent market abuse and reactively comply with stringent legislation requirements. The solution captures, indexes, analyses and extracts relevant data from all voice, email and chat interactions - in up to 79 languages and dialects - enabling compliance officers to find specific, relevant communications about any given trade or trader, and present it to regulators upon request within moments. It also enables compliance teams to analyse all trading floor communications in real-time to identify potential non-compliant behaviours that could damage a financial institution's credibility or increase its financial or legal liability due to unauthorized trades.

The solution interfaces with the financial institution's existing hardware and software, so banks do not have to incur additional IT infrastructure costs or change their IT or business processes in order to comply. Financial institutions can use their existing physical or cloud-based data storage infrastructure, or Fonetic can host the solution if desired.

"The simple reality is that all the world's leading banks will have to comply with Dodd-Frank by April 2014 or risk severe penalties. The challenge for banks is how to compete in the highly dynamic derivatives and swaps markets and not be over-burdened by compliance processes," explained Juan Manuel Soto, CEO, Fonetic. "For the past four years, Fonetic has honed its expertise and technical understanding within its domestic market, delivering stress-free recordkeeping compliance to some of the biggest banks in Spain. Starting today, our solution is now available to banks and trading firms globally, and we look forward to ensuring that traders can continue to work in the most efficient way, while still providing compliance departments with the reassurance they need to trace every interaction on any given trade if required to by regulators."