What People Actually Feel— Below the Surface

The Emotional Insight

by Cavefish  ·  Issue #1  ·  March 2026

Welcome to the signal.

Somewhere across the Channel, regulators are fining companies up to €35 million for using emotion surveillance in workplaces.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, the FCA has explicitly named it as best practice for protecting vulnerable customers.

That's the world Cavefish operates in — and it's exactly why this newsletter exists. We're EchoDepth, Cardiff's emotion AI platform, and every fortnight we'll bring you the data, stories, and insights that help you stay ahead of one of the fastest-moving spaces in tech.

Welcome to Issue #1.

📞  The Big Story

Your call centre is flying blind

Nearly 50% of UK adults — 28 million people — display characteristics of financial vulnerability. Debt. Bereavement. Mental health challenges. Life events that can make a standard financial conversation genuinely harmful — if nobody's paying attention.

Here's the uncomfortable reality: traditional QA reviews just 2–5% of calls. That means the other 95% happen completely unmonitored. Only 19% of Chief Risk Officers feel confident they can identify every vulnerable customer during a live interaction.

The FCA's Consumer Duty framework now makes this a compliance issue, not just an ethical one. Emotion AI that detects distress, confusion, and pressure in real time isn't a nice-to-have. It's fast becoming the standard.

This is what EchoFinTech does. We've been working with call centres to surface the emotional signals that manual reviews miss — not to replace human judgement, but to make sure no vulnerable customer slips through unnoticed.

⚡  Quick Hits

🏉  EchoSports is live — and we're working with the WRU

We're proud to announce our partnership with the Welsh Rugby Union on player performance and wellbeing monitoring. The WRU recently launched a Brain Health Service with World Rugby, with 22% of retired elite players screened immediately referred to cognitive specialists. The direction of travel in elite sport is clear: emotion and mental wellbeing are performance metrics now. EchoSports is built for exactly this moment.

🎖️  EchoDefence: Built after DSEI

After attending DSEI — Europe's largest defence and security expo — one thing became clear: comprehension, trust, and situational awareness are the critical gaps AI hasn't cracked yet. Can you tell if a briefing has truly landed? Does the room understand what's at stake? EchoDefence is our answer — tools for understanding what's really being communicated in high-stakes environments. Not surveillance. Understanding.

🃏  PokerFace: Can AI catch a bluff?

For something a little lighter — meet PokerFace, our new app that puts lie detection in your hands. A Michigan State University study of 19,000+ AI interactions found that AI is dramatically 'lie-biased': brilliant at catching lies (85.8% accurate) but surprisingly bad at believing the truth (19.5% accurate). PokerFace won't replace your polygraph. But it's a fascinating window into how emotion and deception interact — and there are some very serious compliance training applications hiding beneath the fun.

🧠  So, What Is EchoDepth?

Most emotion AI gives you six emotions and a dashboard. EchoDepth maps 52 distinct emotional states — the real complexity of how humans actually feel, not the simplified version.

And where most tools look backwards (what happened on that call?), we're built to look forwards: what's likely to happen next?

We don't do surveillance. We don't diagnose. We don't score individuals. We give decision-makers a clearer emotional signal — so they can act with more confidence, more humanity, and more impact.

If any of this resonates — or if you want to challenge us on it — just hit reply.

We'd genuinely love to know what you're working on.

Jonathan Prescott

CEO, Cavefish

Cardiff · cavefish.co.uk