Financial Transcription: Money talks but words matter

Financial Transcription services for your investor relations calls

Investor Relations (IR) calls (also referred to as earnings conference calls) are essential for all businesses. Whether for publicly- or privately-held organisations, large, small, or medium enterprises, IR calls allow interested parties to understand and analyse the company’s overall health and business outlook. And while these meetings contain a wealth of critical information, they also contain an overwhelming amount of data that is often too difficult to capture in-house. By investing in professional financial transcription services, companies not only meet their legal obligations of financial transparency but also satisfy their internal and external stakeholder commitments.

The many benefits of professional transcription services

Transcription accuracy

Discussing the financial performance of your company is important for analysts, investors, prospective investors, and the media alike. Often held quarterly, IR calls allow interested parties to hear about your business fundamentals, your challenges and successes, and on your sales forecast. During the call, for instance, your management team might need to explain how they over- or under-forecasted the current quarter. They might even be charged with pinpointing the source of your company’s shortfalls — not exactly the most comfortable conversations to have albeit necessary. 

During quarterly IR calls, top management has the legal obligation to present to financial analysts, investors, and all interested shareholders, the company’s financial performance. This information must include (to the best of the company’s leadership understanding) the factors — either positively or negatively — influencing performance. Given the potent demand for accuracy in the financial world, companies often rely on professional transcription services to capture precise meeting details. Ensuring that you partner with a transcription services company that offers the highest-level of accuracy is paramount to your company’s overall reputation for accountability and transparency.

Additional language solutions

For global companies with stakeholders all over the world, IR calls can include foreign phrases, different languages, heavy accents, and colloquialisms, posing great challenges if handling transcriptions in-house. However, one of the key benefits to working with a professional transcription agency is their ability to offer additional linguistic services including translation and proofreading. When you partner with multilingual transcription companies, language specialists with subject matter expertise will likely manage your transcription services. Access to these additional language solutions increases the transcription accuracy as well as the company’s audience reach once you publish your transcript.

Time and resource efficiency

Outsourcing your transcription services enables all attendees to focus squarely on the meeting at hand. By removing the task of transcribing from your internal staff, you greatly lower the risk of transcription errors and inaccuracies which require valuable time and resources to correct. Professional transcriptionists, on the flipside, offer faster turnaround times and increased transcription accuracy, all while allowing your internal team to optimise work hours. 

Cost and reputation protection

We already know that errors in medical transcriptions can — and do — “cost thousands of lives each year.”1 And the financial burden is also nothing to shake a stick at, ranging “[a]nywhere from $17 billion to $29 billion.”2 While other industries don’t necessarily carry the same burden with regard to the health and wellbeing of individuals, they certainly do carry a hefty financial burden when transcription errors occur. In fact, “[b]usinesses lose millions of dollars each year as a result of typographical mistakes. In an age of global exposure and instantaneous connectivity, errors in written communication can have a hugely negative impact on consumer perceptions and create a lasting impression of carelessness.”3 

The following graph depicts just some of the most expensive typos ever recorded:

 

Data Source: Six Degrees

Alitalia Airlines

For Alitalia Airlines, incorrect data input cost the company well over 7 million dollars when it advertised flights from Toronto to Cyprus for $39 instead of the flight’s usual cost of $3,900. In the case of Mizuho Securities (a division of the second-largest national bank in Japan), a typing error led to a loss of nearly $340 million in less than one day. And then there was the 2009 incident when “a government agency in the United Kingdom registered information reporting that a company called Taylor & Son Ltd. was in administration pending liquidation.”4

Unfortunately, the agency added an extra ‘s’ to the word Son, “confusing the company with a respected 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm that employed more than 250 people.”5 The end result? “The British High Court later ruled that the government registrar was directly responsible for the collapse of the company as a result of the extra “s” and awarded damages approaching $14 million.”6

Yellow Pages

For the Yellow Pages, one single misplaced character cost the company $19 million for gross negligence. NASA’s national embarrassment was the result of a missing punctuation mark causing the Mariner 1 space probe to explode shortly after takeoff. “When calculating the adjusted costs of research, development, training and construction, the total losses connected to the accident are estimated to exceed $620 million.”7  

Typographical errors happen across industries, and when they do, they can spell disaster. When it comes to your financial meetings, don’t let this happen to you. One clear way to avoid — or at the very least, greatly reduce — these costly errors is to partner with an experienced and respected global leader in financial transcription services.   

Global Lingo — a global leader in financial transcription services

Offering verbatim, edited (tidied-up), and single-stage transcription services in over 150 languages, Global Lingo partners with some of the largest financial services organisations in the world. Whether you require verbatim transcripts of your Employee Relations (ER) grievance and disciplinary meetings or a tidied-up transcription of your annual financial and sales report shareholder meetings, Global Lingo delivers accurate results every time. Transcribing over 8,000 hours of meetings and events annually, we provide global access to professional and experienced financial transcriptionists in any time zone and for any occasion. By assigning financial transcriptionists based on specialist subject knowledge and content suitability, length, and speaker accents, Global Lingo ensures accurate and detailed transcripts for all of your business meetings. 

Confidential, impartial, secure

Oftentimes, our human resources clients must conduct highly sensitive and confidential meetings such as grievances and disciplinary hearings. With Global Lingo’s proprietary platform GloZone,  we make every effort to satisfy your data security requirements right from the outset. As an ISO 9001-certified company, Global Lingo offers a 3-stage quality process, by first creating a draft transcript. A professional writer then edits and proofreads the draft, checking for the accuracy of content, grammar, and more. In the third round of quality checks, we focus on spelling, numeric data, key terminology, correct spelling of names/attendees, formatting, and presentation. Our many years of experience partnering with some of the largest financial institutions in the world act as a testament to our high level of professionalism. 

Verbatim transcripts

If your compliance and legal processes require verbatim transcription, Global Lingo will accurately transfer the spoken word (word-for-word transcripts). This includes all pauses, laughter, coughs, and all filler words — nothing will be missed from our transcription.

Tidied-up transcripts

For financial hearings, as well as investor relations and board meetings, clients often require transcripts that focus on capturing the meaning of what is being said and don’t particularly want all the extras. For these tidied-up transcriptions, we’ll omit or adjust the non-verbal utterances as well as the filler and repeated words, along with any other irrelevant material, improving the overall readability while never compromising the details.

Single-stage transcripts

Sometimes, our clients require financial transcripts in languages other than English. For meetings that require the translation of any audio or video content, we offer single-stage transcriptions. This simply means that our transcription will be directly translated into another language in the written form all in one step, saving you time and money. Our impressive global network of native speakers coupled with our many years in the translation industry allows us to provide top-notch single-stage transcription services, no matter the format, the industry, or the language. 

Working within the financial industry means finding innovative ways to control costs and maximise efficiency, security, and confidentiality while ensuring accuracy. By partnering with Global Lingo, you’ll be able to devote your full attention to the finances while we handle the financial transcriptions. Reach out to Global Lingo today.

“Businesses lose millions of dollars each year as a result of typographical mistakes. In an age of global exposure and instantaneous connectivity, errors in written communication can have a hugely negative impact on consumer perceptions and create a lasting impression of carelessness.”

— Six Degrees

REFERENCES

1, 2 Larmoyeux & Bone. “Medical Transcription Errors Threatens Lives – Medication Error.” Larmoyeux & Bone, 29 Oct. 2014, www.lb-law.com/medical-malpractice/medical-transcription-errors-threatens-lives/. 

3, 4, 5, 6, 7 “High Cost of Small Mistakes: Most Expensive Typos of All Time.” Six Degrees, 11 May 2015, www.six-degrees.com/the-high-cost-of-small-mistakes-the-most-expensive-typos-of-all-time/.