Kensho-Tegus Case Study
How Tegus used Kensho’s AI to reduce their administrative workload by 70% and level up their compliance funnel
Tegus is a modern research platform for leading investors, providing an end-to-end research ecosystem for investment analysts, portfolio managers, and other key decision makers.
Tegus became a Kensho customer in August, 2021 after a competitive bake-off where Kensho Scribe proved to be more accurate and able to handle more volume than its tested competitors. Tegus uses Kensho Scribe to transcribe its expert calls with high accuracy, and Kensho NERD to highlight entities in transcribed text to assist their compliance team in preparing transcripts to be posted to their platform.
Kensho’s tools have significantly reduced the administrative workload on Tegus’ compliance team through the high quality of the transcriptions provided by Scribe and the consistency from Scribe’s highly trained, full-time staff of human reviewers, who work for Kensho’s parent company, S&P Global.
Tegus has seen exponential growth in the years since its inception, growing from a team of 20 in 2018 to today’s staff of more than 650 in three offices worldwide, including Vancouver, Canada and Waterford, Ireland. The Tegus platform today includes 55K+ transcripts, which adhere to strict regulatory compliance policies; quantitative financial workflows that streamline company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls and filings; and 4K+ financial models and company benchmarking data.
Why Tegus Chose Kensho
Tegus’ growth has meant adapting to many challenges along its journey. The company has maintained its focus on quality, accuracy and customer trust while experiencing dramatic increases in client base, call volume and transcription volume. These were some of the factors that went into the team’s decision to partner with Kensho.
Transcription Bandwidth
Prior to working with Kensho, one key issue Tegus faced was that other transcription services couldn’t handle the large volume of audio processing that Tegus required, especially when it came to the human review part of the process.
Tegus’ General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, Jason Howard, described this problem in more detail: “What Tegus has found consistently is that our volume breaks traditional vendors. They just can’t handle it. They don’t have the resources, the tech or the head count.” At the time, Tegus was using several vendors just to handle the volume.
Transcription Quality
It wasn’t just volume that Tegus needed. The quality and accuracy of transcriptions were paramount. Tegus’ compliance team is responsible for ensuring that the transcripts posted on the platform follow strict regulatory guidelines. They conduct a final review on every transcript before it goes live, but to do that as efficiently as possible, they need to start with accurate, understandable, properly formatted documents.
Jason explained the struggles they were having with accuracy prior to working with Kensho: “Transcription vendors, especially several years ago, weren’t all that good. You would get a garbled mess back from the machine version. We quickly learned that machine versions weren’t good enough on their own. Then, another issue with vendors that became apparent when we started working with companies that actually used humans in the loop to make their products and output better, was that a lot of them just used gig workers.”
The compliance team was finding themselves editing more than they wanted to, struggling to understand transcripts — and not to mention the potential confidentiality risks posed by using a vendor that relied on freelance transcriptionists. Tegus knew they needed a solution that could provide better accuracy, but it wasn’t until they did a transcription bake-off that it became clear it was Kensho Scribe that could provide that solution.
The Bake-Off: Comparing Transcription Vendors
To ensure that Tegus got an unbiased, real-life look at how different vendors compared in terms of quality, the team decided to do a transcription bake-off. Kensho Scribe and other top transcription vendors were sent eight Tegus expert call recordings. The returned transcripts were evaluated for sentence-by-sentence accuracy as well as the number of inaudibles (words that the service couldn’t transcribe at all). During the bake-off, Tegus also tested each vendor’s ability to handle massive volume needs by moving all of their transcription work to one vendor for a period of time and then onto the next to compare the length of time each vendor needed to complete the workload.
Volume wasn’t an issue for Scribe, which combines a low-latency, high efficiency AI transcription — processing 1 hour of audio in about 1 minute — with human-in-the-loop (HITL) review.
And neither was quality. Unlike other vendors that offer HITL-like services, Kensho’s relationship with S&P Global ensures only highly trained, full-time transcriptionists review and correct client transcripts — a big plus for compliance-minded companies like Tegus. S&P Global’s transcription team is more than 400 employees strong and works in lockstep with Kensho to review and correct transcriptions for 99+% accuracy. Each member of the staff is trained for four months before they start editing transcripts and sub-specializes in an industry, such as pharmaceuticals or energy, so they can identify and correctly edit tricky jargon that an average transcriptionist wouldn’t even notice.
Polly Benassi, Director of Compliance Operations at Tegus, explained the results of the bake-off: “We tested quite a few vendors, looking at them side by side. Kensho was the clear winner.” For example, on one transcript, Kensho returned with only one inaudible whereas other competitors had many, including one vendor which returned that same transcript with 52 inaudibles.
Polly described how some of the vendors would mis-transcribe one word or sentence and that would change the entire meaning. “I wrote up a side-by-side comparison of a paragraph and just how many sentences were accurate compared to the audio. Kensho’s were 95% accurate.”
How Tegus Uses Kensho’s AI Toolkit
Tegus uses several tools in the Kensho toolkit, including Kensho Scribe AI, Kensho Scribe HITL (Human-in-the-Loop) and Kensho NERD.
Scribe AI’s Instant Transcripts
Kensho Scribe AI allows Tegus to provide an additional layer of customer service by sending call participants instant transcripts immediately after a call, a feature that wasn’t possible with AI transcription services just a few years ago. These instant transcripts give participants rough draft call notes for their own records. Later, the final transcript, which goes through the full editing and compliance funnel, is posted to the Tegus platform.
Scribe HITL, Already Accurate and Constantly Improving
Tegus uses Kensho Scribe HITL (Human-in-the Loop) to create high-quality transcriptions of expert calls, a key part of the compliance funnel. With Scribe HITL, Tegus combines the strength of machine transcription with human review for the quality end product they need. It’s a process that is designed to be continuously evolving and improving.
As part of its commercial agreement with Kensho, Kensho’s AI models are able to train on aggregated and anonymized Tegus data, in this case, the audio files submitted and the resulting HITL-generated transcripts, allowing for a virtuous cycle of constant improvement.
Kensho keeps Tegus’ data confidential and secure using disassociated processing. Model training occurs with 5–15 second-long segments of an individual speaker called speaker embeddings. Those embeddings are bifurcated and divorced from meaning by stripping the content of speaker tags, topic tags, or any other identifying information before being used.
NERD’s Entity Recognition
Tegus added Kensho NERD about one year after Scribe was implemented. NERD uses entity highlighting to help the Tegus compliance team spot information that may need to be removed from a transcript before it is pushed live, preventing mistakes like client names or material nonpublic information (MNPI) from accidentally being shared on the platform. Tegus combines NERD’s entity recognition with its own proprietary MNPI-detection tools to enhance the work of the compliance team members who are reviewing transcripts before they go to the Tegus platform.
“The highlighting is incredible,” Polly said in describing the impact of adding NERD to the compliance team processes. “Having potential information flagged by highlighting is a game changer. It’s been super helpful.”
The Tegus-Kensho Partnership
From the beginning, the partnership between Kensho and Tegus was more than a typical customer/vendor relationship.
“One of the best things about working with Kensho is the partnership,” Jason said. He explained how he enjoys dropping into the shared Slack channel that the Tegus and Kensho teams use to discuss the project. “The people in that channel are just nice humans, and they work together a lot. You can tell that everyone is saying, hey, we want to make this thing work. It’s really fun to watch the interactions. It’s a partnership that I get a live view into every single day.”
Smooth Implementation Processes
Part of the partnership has also been ensuring that the technical implementation of Kensho tools is easy and that users have the documentation they need at all times. In discussing Kensho, David said, “We’ve been able to stand it up with very little involvement from any technical support within Kensho, which speaks to just the docs and the overall dev experience.”
Both Scribe’s simple REST API and thorough, frequently updated documentation empower developers to test things out and experiment with Kensho’s tools on their own. The services team is available to help and answer questions or to get more involved in implementations as needed, but many of Kensho’s customers find it simple to get started.
Want more detail about Tegus and how they used Kensho products to grow their business? Read the full case study PDF.
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