From Compliance to Care: Prevent Non-Financial Misconduct and Improve Employee Wellbeing with Communications Data Insights

In the previous installments of this blog series, we explored the strategic decision between building or buying your AI capability and discussed how Verint Financial Compliance (VFC) can help turn AI Insights into measurable compliance and collaboration value in financial organizations.

In part three, we go one step further. Workplace culture is becoming a regulated risk, rather than “just” an HR concern. New, non financial misconduct (NFM) obligations mean businesses need to expand their compliance controls to ensure adherence.

Let’s explore how the very same communications already captured for compliance can be repurposed to protect people, strengthen culture, and help firms meet the NFM obligations.

New Requirements Around Workplace Culture and Employee Wellbeing Further Complicate the Regulatory Landscape

Here’s a summary of what’s coming and what it will mean for financial institutions:

• PS25/23, a policy statement issued by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, now elevates serious bullying, harassment, discrimination, and violence between colleagues to a conduct rules breach, aligning banks and non banks. This comes into effect on September 1, 2026.
• The policy also confirms guidance on when behavior counts as NFM, including conduct outside the workplace, for example: client events, messaging apps, and social media.
• The FCA is clear: tackling bullying and harassment is essential to preventing “rolling bad apples” and restoring trust.

This creates a new operational challenge for financial institutions:

What You Need to Detect and Why It Matters

The above regulatory changes are explicit and imminent. They urge financial services firms to further enhance their current controls and expand existing compliance monitoring practices to behavioral signs that had never been in focus before. Here’s what businesses need to look out for going forward:

1. Non-Financial Misconduct Signals

• Persistent interruptions
• Raised aggression or intimidatory tone
• Derogatory or demeaning language
• Power imbalance patterns
• Recurrence across weeks, channels, or team boundaries

2. Employee Wellness and Burnout Signals

• Stress markers: volatile speech, abnormal pauses, sentiment deterioration
• Fatigue indicators: late-day call spikes, shorter interactions, reduced collaboration language

These signals may all be indicative of an unhealthy work environment which can now be a breach of conduct. You must proactively be on the lookout for them to protect your employees and stay clear of potential fines, legal consequences, and reputational damage. But to do this, you must be able to gain explainable, timestamped insights for code of conduct (COCON) assessments and regulatory references.

Additionally, “care-only” alerts could also facilitate early support before issues escalate.

However, it’s important to note:

A positive work environment is good for the employees and good for compliance — a true win-win situation.

How to Detect Non-Financial Misconduct Efficiently

Now that you know what you need to watch out for, let’s see how you can do it efficiently. The best way to do this is through leveraging existing data. That is the regulated communications — spoken or written — that you’ve already captured. No new tools, no parallel pipelines necessary.

Instead, apply explainable analytics to existing transcripts, audio, and metadata to identify:

• NFM indicators: bullying, harassment, intimidation, aggression patterns
• Toxicity signals: consistently hostile tone, escalating conflict
• Wellness markers: rising stress, conversational withdrawal, burnout indicators

By surfacing these behavioral signs using AI-powered analytics, you can gain valuable insights that let you improve workplace culture and comply with new regulatory requirements simultaneously.

Example Application Scenarios

Let’s see what different wellbeing insight workflows would look like in real life.

1. Conduct Alert + HR Case Support

• Senior employee demonstrating repeated hostile behavior towards junior employee over several weeks.
• A COCON flag is generated for the compliance team with explainable evidence.
• HR receives pattern visibility, and manager receives coaching prompt.
• Support and investigation proceed with clarity and documentation.

2. Employee Wellness Early Warning

• Employee demonstrates shifts in call tone, latency, and sentiment, indicating possible burnout.
• A “care-only” alert prompts a check in.
• If the employee’s behavior stabilizes, the alert closes. If it escalates, it’s reclassified appropriately.

Regulatory Reference Readiness

Once a case is substantiated, it’s also important that you consolidate all auditable evidence and separate welfare related signals from proven misconduct clearly. This ensures future regulatory references are accurate and defensible.

Drive Tangible Compliance and Employee Wellbeing Outcomes

Through reusing regulated communications for people centered intelligence, firms can efficiently:

• Prevent harm by surfacing issues early
• Strengthen conduct governance with explainable, structured evidence
• Support managers in creating psychologically safe teams
• Build trust with employees and regulators alike
• Align cultural health with operational resilience and conduct strategies

Just as VFC AI Insights can help turn captured data into efficiency and compliance value (as discussed in part two of this blog series), you can turn the same data into culture value — protecting your employees, your clients, and the firm itself in the process.

Stay tuned to learn more about innovations in Verint Financial Compliance that can help your business comply with FCA’s employee wellbeing requirements. In the meantime, read this blog and watch our joint webinar with Wordwatch to learn how it can help improve adherence to other financial regulations such as MifID III.