Financial Transcription is Outsourced Frequently and Transcription Centers in India are Buzzing With Activity

chillibreeze writer —Ganesh Balasubramaniam

A group of youngsters huddle around a computer. It is well past midnight in a residential neighborhood in Bangalore. The computer’s audio cackles: “Welcome to Arkelor Inc., third quarter earnings release conference call.” The rich baritone of the CEO wishes you good morning, it being daytime in the US, though night in Bangalore, and gives a verbal account of the quarter’s financial results. This is being taped on the computer and the youngsters scurry around excited. Every three minutes, this tape is sent off for transcription, or to be converted into readable text. You’ve just witnessed a slice of life in the BPO world, the new job opportunity in India’s cities.

Along with that, some jobs just got ‘Bangalored’, which in US parlance means outsourced, yes, and you guessed it, in this case to Bangalore. Though this phenomenon has been around for close to a decade with the entry of ITES and medical transcription, BPO is the latest buzzword that could mean anything from call centers, banking, customer support, data entry to work-at-home typing jobs. The scenario above describes financial or business transcription.

Transcription and ‘Transcriptionists’

Transcription is the art of converting the spoken word to readable text. Used frequently in the healthcare industry, where doctors’ dictations on treated patients is transmitted digitally via the internet where a transcriptionist listens, types it out and transmits it back to the hospital as text, transcription is now used to record financial earnings disclosures every quarter. Though voice recognition software is slowly gaining ground, it is prone to a lot of errors and human intervention is unavoidable. So even in this increasingly high-tech world, to convert audio to text, you still need the old fashioned transcriber or ‘transcriptionists’ as they are now called.

Financial Transcription

What does it take to be a financial transcriptionist? You’ve got to be comfortable with a variety of accents, be well versed in business terminology and possess a vast English vocabulary, a keen analytical brain, and loads of energy. This is where seeing all those Hollywood films come in handy. How does one transcribe spoken words? First of all, the audio tape or digital wave file is the raw material. Listening to it through a specialized software, with features which allows you to rewind, pause, and fast forward by using a foot operated pedal, you listen to the text and type it out as a document. Sounds easy? Wait until you’ve heard some of the weirdest accents ranging from the Southern drawl, the Latin American to Chinese or Korean speakers. Added to that, you would have to make sense of terms like “diluted earnings”, "Sarbanes Oxley", "throughput" "Black-Scholes method" “back-end loaded quarter”, “volatility”, “Street estimates”, "Gramm-Bleach-Bliley Act"or “tech stocks”. You would also listen to names such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Steifel Nicolaus or Salomon Smith Barney, which are some famous investment firms. Accuracy of the highest order is called for and one needs to be careful about the difference between millions and billions or even cents, the latter being very important in share prices. And remember you’ve just got three hours to turn around an hour-long tape. To give you an idea, to transcribe five minutes of audio, it might take half an hour. Add to that a frenzied search over websites to get obscure references of brands, competitors, names and places; you have a lot to squeeze into those three hours.

The floor of a transcription company is always humming with activity even in the dead of the night. Headphones strapped on, fingers flying over the keyboard, feet stomping over the pedal, a transcriptionist experiences a rush of adrenalin when he is typing out a financial report.

Meanwhile, another conference call is starting. The audio comes alive: “Welcome to Starvista Inc second quarter earnings conference call. I am the CEO and Chairman and with me is Jim, our CFO. We had a great quarter…” It has been a long, but in the world of BPO, the excitement never ends.

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Ganesh writes for chillibreeze.

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