Just for the record

Capturing voice and data interaction between the banks and their customers is a critical aspect of the financial services business. To find out more, FST catches up with Haim Shani, CEO of Israeli-based NICE Systems – a market-leading provider in this field.

FST. Firstly, could you outline how NICE Systems is positioned in the marketplace and detail some of the products or services that you offer, as well as a bit about your role?
HS. I’m the CEO of NICE Systems. This is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ, with about $2 billion of market capital. I have run the company for the past seven years. NICE is the leading supplier of solutions that capture primarily voice and related data interactions in the financial services organizations. Most of the trades today in the world – whenever there is a voice interaction between traders and their clients – is captured using NICE technology, so application slice like compliance, dispute management and also some internal training and so on. Within the financial services arena a significant part of the contact centers of these organizations, as well as to some extent the back offices, capture their interactions with their clients – whether it’s primarily in retail banking, insurance companies and so on. They would capture their interactions with their clients in the contact center using our technology, primarily for applications such as compliance, dispute settlement and quality monitoring and quality assurance.

FST. And in terms of the financial services organizations that you do business with, are they primarily tier one, tier two or tier three organizations?
HS. We have 85 percent of the Fortune 100 companies using our technology, so this represents, obviously, most of the big banks and most of the big financial services. We have thousands of clients, so I would say we are a leading supplier both for tier one and tier two in terms of financial services.

FST. In terms of your go-to-market strategy and executing, promoting your business and spearheading new initiatives, what currently are you doing to get your message out?
HS. That’s a very good point. If there’s one point that I would like to get across in this interview it is that NICE is bringing to the table, after investing over $40 million of research and development, a very innovative solution that we believe can significantly transform the way that financial services handle, manage and understand their client interactions. And as a result, they can significantly improve their business performance, improve the results in terms of customer churn, profitability and operational efficiency.

What do I mean by that? To be more specific, when I introduced the company a minute ago, I mentioned that we capture most of the voice interactions for applications like dispute settlement, compliance and quality monitoring. By doing that, we have created a huge database of actual customer interactions that until recently could not be mined and analyzed. We have launched a product suite called NICE Perform, with the introduction of interaction analytics, which can actually translate every customer interaction into structured data that can be mined and analyzed.

What does it mean? Now the financial services organizations that have in some cases tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of calls a day can actually have the system, our system, scan through these calls, listen to them, have the computer listen to these calls and analyze them for opportunities or threats. If you have a platinum customer that might be aggravated because of some bad service, if you have communication issues within your interaction with customers, if you have compliance issues, whether you have people that have not adhered to the bank or the financial services organization policy, we now can monitor those calls, understand the issues and alert on, as I said, opportunity or threats for the financial services customers. Until recently, there’s no way – and these interactions with clients are handled by relatively – I would say – entry-level people within the organization. Now, our system can add sophistication, knowledge and understanding of these interactions in order to provide feedback for our clients and how well they are doing. So this is very revolutionary.

FST. If we’re to look at the market space and for other companies that crossover into your area of expertise, what would you say is the clear-cut distinction between you and some of your competitors, and what would make someone choose to go with NICE?
HS. Very good question. I would say that there are two – there are actually several distinct areas. I would highlight all of them. The first one is the fact that financial services organizations, just by definition, require high resiliency and high reliability. If you need to capture customer interactions for compliance and dispute settlement, and if it’s a transaction that involves or can involve sometimes millions of dollars or hundreds and thousands of dollars, you better have it on the record when you need it. And therefore, we have been in this business of compliance and liability recording for many years. This is a strong area of expertise, and we provide this resilience and reliability.

The second part is our multidimensional adaptive analytics. This is our ability to take many parameters around an interaction, whether it’s what a customer has said, in what context, what was the emotion level, what was the method data around, what was the data around the interaction, combine all of it into one data warehouse, and then analyze it. This is the real meat.

And the third part, which is extremely important to financial services organizations, is our global service approach. We understand that many customers need the same standard of service around the world. We have many customers that are global. And our global footprint is half of the business is in the Americas, 30 percent in Europe and 20 percent in Asia.

FST. And so in terms of the global approach, what are you doing to ensure that you strengthen your global branding?
HS. We go to events and shows. We have set up teams that are handling our global customers on a global basis, regardless of where they are on the globe, providing, if you like, a standard approach to these organizations. We have, from time to time, media coverage such as CNN and others who have expressed interest in our technology and have had several major feature stories about what we do.

FST. If I ask you to step out of your role and the company for a moment, what do you foresee NICE’s key business challenge moving forward over the next 12 months to maintain your position in the marketplace?
HS. I think we have an innovative variable position, and I’m trying to be humble, but still, I would say so, an innovative variable position that can significantly change the way our customers interact with their clients. Having said so, we know that to implement this distance, to have our clients adapt them in a clever way that will influence their business is a challenge. Organizations are traditionally more conservative. It takes time to adapt, and I would say that we have seen initial success of customers in the financial services, like Lending.com, for example, which we announced just a few weeks ago, that have implemented this technology and are seeing a significant benefit. So it is how to scale and make sure that our clients understand the benefits across their organization. That’s our challenge in the coming months and probably years.