Event Recap: AI in Compliance - Risky Disruption or Regulatory Lifeline?

Published 22/05/25 under:

Tackling Compliance in the AI Era: Kerv Unveils Guardian Assurance Suite for Smarter Record-Keeping

Faced with evolving regulatory demands, financial compliance professionals are constantly navigating a challenging environment where AI plays an increasing role.

Kerv’s recent event which took place in the extraordinary comfort of the Everyman Cinema, brought together experts to confront these record-keeping challenges, highlighting the mismatch between fast-moving technology and lagging governance. The event notably featured two product launches including an in-depth demonstration of Kerv’s Guardian Assurance product suite, built with a Simple, Fast, Clear UX-first philosophy. This suite includes Endpoint Assure for verifying voice endpoint readiness before the trading day, CDR Assure for ensuring complete call capture and flagging any missing data immediately, and Config Assure for maintaining the voice recording environment’s integrity against a gold standard.

Attendees also saw the introduction of Mobile Compliance by Kerv, a holistic managed service designed to capture communications across voice, SMS, and messaging platforms seamlessly in the background. Discussions reinforced the strategic necessity of unified data capture, leveraging AI for enhanced management with crucial human oversight, and prioritising audit readiness from the ground up in this complex era.

The Reality of Record-Keeping: Explosive Data & Regulatory Lag

The core issue facing the financial sector is the explosion of communication data across a myriad of channels – voice, chat, video, mobile (SMS, social – WhatsApp, Signal and so many more!), and increasingly, AI-generated summaries. While technology, particularly AI, is advancing at a breath-taking pace, compliance frameworks and governance policies are struggling to keep up, creating a growing mismatch and significant risk points for firms.

This tension highlights four shared concerns among financial institutions:

• Data Completeness: Ensuring everything across all channels, including AI summaries, is captured.
• Accuracy: Trusting AI summaries and outputs, and mitigating the risks of hallucination or missed nuance.
• Audit Readiness: The ability to instantly prove who said what, when, and where across every channel.
• Personal Accountability: The increasing stakes under frameworks like SMCR in the UK, making compliance failures not just a corporate issue but an individual one.

Legacy compliance systems, often designed only for voice and email, are simply not built to handle the scale, speed, and fragmentation of modern communications and AI integration. Relying solely on AI outputs can create dangerous gaps, exposing firms to regulatory breaches and audit failures. As Ravi Sharma, Kerv’s Head of Cloud and Technology Strategy noted, regulatory audits are becoming more frequent, making robust record-keeping ever more critical.

Kerv’s Strategic Shift: Innovation Over Integration

Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental shift in approach. Kerv has embraced an ethos of innovation over integration, rebuilding from the ground up rather than trying to retrofit new technologies onto outdated systems. The goal is to solve real business problems by focusing on targeted innovation and controlling the core technology stack.

Key strategic pillars for effective compliance in this new reality include:

• Unified Data Capture: Capturing all channels – voice, video, chat, mobile, AI notes/summaries – in one place to eliminate gaps that regulators focus on.
• AI-Enhanced Management with Human Oversight: Using AI for data management tasks like tagging and flagging risk, but ensuring crucial human review remains part of the process.
• Future Proofing: Building systems with auditability and traceability designed in from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Compliance by Design: Embedding compliance directly into workflows so it becomes a natural habit, not just a checklist item.
• Treating Compliance as a Strategic Advantage: Recognising that effective compliance enables firms to move faster, build trust, and differentiate themselves.

Introducing the Guardian Assurance Product Suite: Simple, Fast, Clear

A highlight of the event was the launch of Kerv’s Guardian Assurance product suite, embodying a deliberate shift towards a UX-first philosophy. Guided by the principles of Simple, Fast, and Clear, Guardian Assurance is designed to make finding necessary compliance information incredibly easy, even in complex environments. This platform is the result of extensive user research, direct customer feedback, and continuous iteration.

The Guardian Assurance suite provides complete confidence across the recording environment by bringing together three key products, all of which were demonstrated by Miranda Ansell, Kerv’s UX Design Lead:

1. Endpoint Assure: This product tackles the critical challenge of ensuring every voice endpoint (turrets, desk phones) is ready for recording before the trading day begins. It performs daily automated sweeps using patent-pending next-gen audio testing for greater accuracy than traditional methods. Users receive simple pass-fail reports, enabling them to start the day with confidence in their compliance readiness.
2. CDR Assure: Addressing the fundamental question “how do we know every single call was recorded?”, CDR Assure continuously compares actual recordings against expected call data across all platforms. It immediately flags any missing, corrupted, or out-of-sync data and pushes alerts into existing operational workflows. This provides compliance teams with confidence that no data is missed and ensures proactive audit readiness. The interface includes purpose-built pages tailored to different user personas and use cases, including dedicated views for ‘not recorded calls’.
3. Config Assure: Designed to maintain the integrity of the voice recording environment, Config Assure runs silent checks every 15 minutes to ensure servers and software components match a defined “gold standard configuration”. It acts as a real-time trip wire, instantly alerting engineers to any deviations, no matter how small. This allows issues to be caught and fixed quickly before they impact recording or compliance, preventing downtime and misconfigurations.

All three products are fully integrated into a single platform accessible through one login, simplifying management, monitoring, and compliance efforts.

Mobile Compliance by Kerv: One Holistic Solution

Acknowledging the prevalence of business communications occurring across a multitude of platforms beyond traditional desk phones, the event also saw Rachel Verguson, Operations Team Leader launch Mobile Compliance by Kerv. This service directly addresses the hurdles firms face with platform fragmentation, adherence complexity, user workarounds, lack of centralised control, and managing multiple suppliers for mobile compliance.

With one attendee nicknaming this the “holy grail” for mobile communications compliance, Mobile Compliance by Kerv is a fully managed service that effortlessly captures calls and SMS silently in the background. Key benefits include:

• Unified Service: Capturing voice, SMS, and messaging platforms (like WhatsApp) under one service supported by Kerv.
• Global Coverage: Supporting teams operating across continents with home coverage in 25+ countries.
• No User Intervention: Automated monitoring and archiving run flawlessly in the background.
• Total Visibility & Control: A centralised intelligence solution ensures every interaction is trackable and auditable.
• Network-Based Capture: Providing reliable, automatic, and always-on capture with minimal user setup (SIM swap or QR code scan).
• Versatile Communication Support: Capturing 1:1, broadcasts, group chats, attachments, and rich media, with full transparency on participants and modality in group chats.

While capturing communications on personal devices used for business raises complexities, especially under BYOD models, Kerv’s approach prioritises complete capture to avoid regulatory gaps. The challenge often lies not in the technology’s capability but the internal bank processes and due diligence required to authorise new communication channels.

AI’s Role in Compliance: Beyond Summarisation

The discussion around AI was central to the event. AI is no longer a future concept; it’s currently embedded in systems for tasks like summarising conversations and flagging keywords. Kerv is leveraging AI to tackle difficult, structured problems.

Beyond basic summarisation, AI is seen as instrumental for:

• Enhanced Analysis and Surveillance: Processing large data sets from multiple communication modes faster than human review, enabling proactive risk management by identifying call sentiment or red flag phrases.
• Improved Efficiency: Automating manual processes like data reconciliation. Kerv’s use of AI in CDR reconciliation demonstrated phenomenal speed improvements compared to market alternatives.
• Development Assistance: Kerv uses AI (like Copilot stack) to scan code for vulnerabilities and verify human-written code.

However, the risks of AI, such as hallucinations, data quality issues, and bias, were acknowledged. Furthermore, regulators are also exploring the use of AI to process data, which will inevitably change the regulatory landscape. This underscores the need for preparedness, robust guardrails, and ethical frameworks when implementing AI in compliance.

Preparation, Not Perfection

Solving today’s compliance challenges isn’t just about technology; it requires strategic focus, leadership, and a willingness to reimagine processes. Preparation, not perfection, is the goal. The firms best positioned for the future are resilient, flexible, transparent, and ready to adapt. Building a culture where people are bought into compliance as a daily habit is crucial.

Kerv’s Guardian Assurance suite and Mobile Compliance platform represent a commitment to this vision, offering innovative solutions built with user experience and inherent compliance capabilities to help the financial sector navigate the complexities of modern record-keeping in the AI era.

Kyle took it one step further, hinting at the next project his team are already aiming for. Aiming to lead by example, when asked by one audience member in the Q&A section, “What next?”, Kyle Ansari shared that Kerv is developing the Pulse AI engine for automatically analysing infrastructure faults and logs. This engine is also being trained to understand banking policies, allowing compliance officers to query the system in natural language (Natural Language to SQL) to look for specific rule breaches within transcripts. Another future product, Insight, uses AI (River ML) for predictive infrastructure scaling based on business needs.

This event highlighted that success hinges on innovation over integration, adopting a UX-first philosophy, and fostering a culture where compliance is a daily habit, not just a checkbox.

As preparation trumps perfection in this dynamic environment, discover how Kerv’s targeted innovation and compliance-by-design approach can help your firm move faster, build trust, and achieve total confidence in your record-keeping strategy. Ready to explore how these solutions can transform your compliance operations? Get in touch today to learn more.