The Company
ACA Group is a global leader in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions.
With clients ranging from hedge funds and private equity firms to global asset managers and broker dealers, ACA’s mission is to help financial institutions manage their regulatory and reputational risk with speed and precision.
At the heart of ACA’s offering is ComplianceAlpha® – a comprehensive platform that brings together archiving, surveillance, and analytics to meet the demands of modern compliance teams. Within it, the Ecomms module captures and monitors voice, email, chat, and messaging channels – surfacing red flags before they become full-blown issues.
“We’re not going back to the way folks used to communicate. Compliance has to keep pace – and adapt to how people really work today.”
Peter Kenny, Managing Director, ACA Group
The Challenge
As communication channels multiplied – from Teams calls to WhatsApp to hybrid English-Spanish voice notes – ACA needed a transcription engine that could keep up.
Key requirements included:
High accuracy in real-world environments, including crosstalk, noise and emotional tone
Support for multiple languages and dialects, with cultural nuance and idiomatic understanding
The ability to detect and transcribe code-switching mid-conversation
Low false positive rates – to avoid wasting analyst time
Flexibility to support both cloud and on-prem deployments for enterprise clients
For ACA, accuracy alone wasn’t enough. The enterprise solution had to scale and reduce the complexity that comes with massive volumes of unstructured data.
The Solution
ACA integrated Speechmatics’ transcription engine into its Ecomms platform, enabling smarter voice analysis across compliance workflows.
The engine proved particularly effective in areas such as:
Real-world performance Speechmatics delivered reliable transcription in messy, real-world conditions – from financial floor calls to multi-speaker meetings.
Multilingual support With coverage spanning dozens of languages – and the ability to track code-switching – the engine handled the linguistic complexity of global financial institutions.
Noise reduction Advanced NLP capabilities filtered out irrelevant content like spam or server messages, cutting down on false positives and analyst fatigue.
Flexible deployment Speechmatics supported both on-prem and cloud-based use cases, allowing ACA to meet strict data privacy and security requirements.
“Speechmatics is one of the better providers we’ve worked with — both in terms of language coverage and transcription accuracy.”
The Impact
By embedding Speechmatics into their infrastructure, ACA is able to:
Improve transcription accuracy for surveillance across multiple voice sources
Reduce noise and false positives using intelligent filtering
Support clients operating in dozens of languages and regulatory jurisdictions
Scale surveillance workflows to match rising communication volumes
Prepare for future AI applications, including real-time analysis and LLM summarization
These improvements are already reshaping how ACA’s clients approach risk detection – moving from blunt 2% sampling to precision-driven automation that actually keeps up with regulators.
“Today, firms get regulatory inquiries within days. Ten years ago, it could take a year. That shift means our tech has to be faster, smarter, and more agile.”
What’s Next?
ACA is actively exploring new frontiers in compliance innovation without compromising its core mission of reliability.
Upcoming priorities include:
Broader language support, including dialect-rich and emerging markets.
Multilingual transcription in a single pass, without duplicate runs.
LLM-powered summarization to reduce manual review.
Future-facing use cases like real-time monitoring and voice AI agents.
