Behavox Wants To Use Machine Learning To Mine Your Company's Data And Make Employees More Efficient

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In this episode of the Fintech Focus podcast, we look at the world of fintech in a whole new way—a way that’s not explicitly dealing in dollars and cents, but still looks to maximize efficiencies in the industry. What does that mean exactly? Well, it’s a little tricky to explain.
 
That’s why we have Erkin Adylov do the talking here. Adylov is the CEO of Behavox, an AI platform that runs like an operating system in the workplace, specifically in financial services. Companies in the industry generate a lot of data. Behavox gathers that data, analyzes it, and generates actionable insights for companies. 
 
Listen to the podcast below to hear more about how Behavox is tapping into the human element of the financial services industry and helping companies run more efficiently. 

Behavox is touted as a people analytics company. What exactly does that mean?
It used to be that it's easier just to turn around and say something to a person sitting next to you. But now, I routinely see my people sitting and slacking each other or sending emails to each other or being on Bloomberg chat or on Symphony. This move, this migration of work to a digital domain, that's what's really interesting to me. Because that makes work completely invisible and makes work collaboration and kind of any outcome that comes out of that work, also invisible and unanalyzable.

So what Behavox does is that it comes in and it starts aggregating all of this communications data because the more work you do in a digital domain, the more that data lends itself to analysis. So once you analyze all that data, you should be able to orchestrate and run your company better, in ways you certainly couldn't do before.

Explain what exactly Behavox is trying to do.
So, if you go back to what I said, in terms of internal data, so we aggregate all the communications data, all the revenue data, any type of data really, that resides inside a company. So we would install the system and all of this data that starts getting integrated, and then, it's a data feed off all the emails, all the phone calls, all the chats that the company has internally, but also with their clients. The system then runs quite sophisticated machine learning models on top of that data to extract what we call behavioral signals. Now, behavioral signal is something like whispering or sending somebody an emoticon, or responding to somebody in the middle of the night.

Behavox then mines that data set, and extracts those behavioral signals which then allows companies to use those behavioral signals to predict various behaviors and various outcomes. So, as an example, compliance people and risk people use our system to mine behavioral signals which are correlated with breaching compliance rules, and at the same time, front- office people, so that's anybody who's generating revenue, is using our system to mine behavioral signals that are correlated to making money. So, you can use the system in both ways to optimize for the outcome that you're really looking for.

What kind of companies are you connecting with, hoping to help maximize?
In terms of the verticals, we sell into banking, so Citigroup Inc C is an investor but also a client. We've recently announced that Jefferies has signed on with us, which is one of their major U.S. investment banks, and then if you take hedge funds, we have a number of clients, big and small, sovereign wealth funds, private equity funds, and it kind of like the blue chip of the hedge fund world. We also happen to have corporate clients that also buy compliance product from us. So, it's kind of a broad footprint of clients. Obviously the corporates they buy because of financial regulations.