Capita Consulting helps FSCS rapidly assess compensation claims

Capita Consulting was tapped by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme to help it transcribe hundreds of thousands of audio files to review compensation eligibility among consumers. In order to accurately and quickly do this, the consultancy leveraged the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services suite to create a new solution to help similar clients save time and money in the future.

The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) is the UK's statutory deposit insurance and investors compensation programme, covering customers of authorised financial services firms. This means that FSCS can pay compensation if a firm is unable, or likely to be unable, to pay claims against it – something which is increasingly important in the volatile markets of the pandemic economy.

Recently, when it began investigating one particular firm that had gone out of business, the FSCS was faced with the prospect of having to transcribe and review more than 700,000 audio files as part of the process of reviewing consumers’ eligibility for compensation. This is something which would traditionally take a tremendous amount of time and resources to complete – needing an estimated eight months and 30 transcriptionists to ensure a high level of accuracy – while customers awaited the outcome.

In this case, however, the organisation contacted Capita Consulting for help – a move which ultimately led to a huge efficiency gains relating to the process. The UK based professional services firm is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, and soon began exploring how to use Microsoft technology to best serve FSCS; ultimately to use Speech services – part of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services – such as Speech to Text, to accurately generate transcripts of the audio files.

The team watched for any errors and then trained custom models using Custom Speech for greater accuracy on keywords that were specific to FSCS’s requirements. This method saw Capita Consulting complete the development of an end-to-end solution, including training the Custom Speech model, in just 10 weeks. From there, the solution was deployed to accurately transcribe the calls in a further three weeks – enabling the client to offer a solution that was 90% than had been estimated, while cutting costs by half.

Speaking in a release on Microsoft’s website, Matt Stagg, Head of Data and AI Solutioning at Capita, noted, “We realised we could stand up solutions faster using Microsoft capabilities compared to any of our other ecosystems… We were amazed at how quickly we accomplished this project… We’re experienced at using data science to create our own solutions, and Azure Cognitive Services helped us further accelerate the delivery of a client solution.”

One of the key achievements of the project was that not only was the creation of the transcriptions much faster, but using Cognitive Services also helped make the whole process more targeted. The solution offered by Capita Consulting enabled FSCS the ability to search by keyword, meaning staff could focus on the relevant calls, saving nearly 75% of the manual workload FSCS still needed to input after transcription.

With Capita Consulting having quickly taken this solution to market, it can now offer those benefits to future clients, helping them also save time and money on important administrative tasks.

“By working with FSCS, we’ve demonstrated that we can create the solution, deliver quickly, and repeat,” concluded Stagg. “We know that the need for voice-to-text projects and changing unstructured to structured data is huge for law enforcement, security organisations, government clients, financial services, and critical infrastructure organisations.”