AFTAs 2020: Most Innovative Third-Party Technology Vendor (AI, Machine Learning and Analytics)—Behavox

Enterprise risk and compliance solutions provider Behavox experienced explosive demand for its product in 2020, as the world’s sudden pivot to remote working tested business continuity protocols and created new opportunities for employee misconduct.

This is why the company—which offers a machine learning-powered platform that helps firms aggregate and analyze enterprise communications data, including email, messaging and voice, for risk assessment, regulatory compliance and fraud monitoring—wins this AFTA for the second year in a row. “The coronavirus accelerated the understanding that the workplace is no longer a place,” says Erkin Adylov, Behavox founder and CEO. “It has become a digital realm, and the laws of people don’t apply in that realm—it is a complete Wild West. And work is not going to become less digital—firms are thinking that we need to bring the same laws that govern our day-to-day lives to that digital realm, but they need someone to organize all the data they generate.”

Early in 2020, Behavox received a $100 million investment from SoftBank, itself a client. The company then signed up a number of the world’s largest banks and asset managers, and doubled its headcount, as it moved into new territories (Japan and the Nordics) and expanded its existing office in Montreal to accommodate additional data scientists and engineers.

The company also managed to complete implementations in months that normally would have taken far more time, with many customers taking advantage of the cloud-based version of the platform. One implementation, at Danske Bank, took just five months. 

This year, as the company grows, it is planning to enhance its platform with Behavox Boost, a tool for modeling employee performance, and Motivate, which analyzes “soft” concepts like team morale and the quality of team collaboration.