By Jamie Hoyle, VP, Product, MirrorWeb
The communications supervision market has matured fast, and AI has accelerated that significantly. There are more credible options available to regulated firms than ever before, and making the right choice comes down to knowing what to look for. These four questions will help you go into the process informed and come out with the right fit.
1. How was your model trained?
This is one of the most important questions a firm can ask, and one of the most frequently overlooked.
AI models are shaped by what they were trained on. A model built natively on years of regulated financial communications will understand that context in a way that a general-purpose model, retrofitted for compliance after the fact, simply cannot. The nuance of how registered representatives communicate, how market-sensitive language appears in context, how relationships evolve across a conversation history – none of that comes from a model that learned compliance as an afterthought.
Ask vendors to be specific: how much data, from what context, and over what time period.
2. How does your system go beyond keyword matching?
Keyword matching has been the foundation of communications supervision for years, but it has a significant limitation: it flags the word, not the intent.
Consider a simple example. The phrase “let’s take this offline” is entirely unremarkable in most professional exchanges. In the context of a conversation where a potential conflict of interest has already surfaced, it reads very differently. A keyword-based system treats both identically. A contextually aware system does not.
Ask vendors how their model interprets the relationship between messages, the history behind a conversation, and the intent a reasonable reviewer would infer.
3. What does alert reduction look like in practice?
Supervision alerts are sometimes misunderstood. The majority of flagged communications will not represent genuine violations, and that is entirely expected. Surfacing communications for review is how supervision is supposed to work.
What matters is whether the system helps reviewers focus on the communications most worthy of their attention. A system that surfaces thousands of alerts of roughly equal weight makes that task harder. A system that ranks alerts by risk, with the context to support that ranking, makes it significantly easier.
Ask vendors for real numbers from real deployments, and ask how alerts are determined before they are presented to reviewers.
4. How do you ingest and apply my firm’s compliance policies?
Off-the-shelf supervision rulesets are designed for the broadest possible application, which means they rarely reflect how any individual firm really operates. Your policies, your risk appetite, your specific obligations under your compliance programme – these are particular to your firm.
Ask vendors whether they can ingest your actual compliance policies and enforce them as written, and whether updates to your programme are reflected in the system without requiring lengthy reconfiguration.
Asking these questions early helps firms move past surface-level comparisons and focus on what matters in practice. As regulatory obligations continue to evolve, the right fit is worth the due diligence.
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Jamie Hoyle is VP, Product at MirrorWeb where he leads product strategy. He joined MirrorWeb as Lead Software Engineer in 2017, eventually transitioning to Product and spearheading the development of their flagship communications supervision platform, MirrorWeb Insight.
In 2024, Jamie relocated to Austin, Texas to embed himself in the heart of the US compliance landscape and stay close to the customers shaping the future of digital communications oversight.
