New NLG Platform offers large financial and pharmaceutical firms a radically new approach to fast-track complex report automation and deliver significant ROI

Yseop, the world-leading AI software company and pioneer in Natural Language Generation (NLG), today announced the launch of Augmented Analyst, a new enterprise-wide NLG automated report generation platform. Augmented Analyst is designed to help financial and pharmaceutical companies accelerate their digital transformation.

Stemming from the imperative to move away from high-cost individual point solutions, Yseop leveraged over 10 years of experience in the field and invested into an important R&D program, working closely with industry leaders such as Sanofi, Moody’s and BNP Paribas, to develop its Augmented Analyst platform.

Built on a unique synergy of advanced AI technologies, Augmented Analyst relies on a powerful industry-leading patented NLG engine and extended NLU and Machine Learning capabilities, to draw insight from structured data, translating them into clearly written reporting narratives. The technology is praised by end-users for the high quality of the human-like language output. The new platform currently supports two vertical solutions, Augmented Financial Analyst and Augmented Medical Writer.

With a short learning curve and deployments reduced to weeks, rather than months, Augmented Analyst provides a new opportunity for enterprises to fast-track first NLG use case implementations. This is significantly reducing the time and cost of repetitive reporting tasks, with an immediate impact on the bottom line. The platform, scalable by design, can then seamlessly be extended to streamline from 1 to dozens of the most complex report automation processes, exponentially increasing ROI benefits for a lower total cost of ownership.

Terttu Haring, Global Head of Clinical Digital and Data Innovation at Sanofi said:

“By assisting and streamlining our Clinical Report Authoring, Yseop and Augmented Medical Writer is today helping reduce the time, and in the future also the costs,  involved in reporting, enabling us to accelerate the delivery of new medicines.  We can bring drugs to market at a faster pace which may benefit patients around the world.” 

According to Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for Natural Language Generation Platforms[1], “25% of enterprises will use some form of natural language generation technology by 2022”. Based on actual ROI findings collected across over 100 successful Yseop projects, scaling from single use case applications to enterprise-wide deployments could translate into billions in savings for the financial and pharmaceutical industries.

Developed with high levels of user-adoption as a driver, the new Augmented Analyst solutions come with a user-friendly Studio interface, providing intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities. The new interface was built to empower non-tech savvy business experts to design and configure reporting models based on their needs and across different business departments with no custom development.
The solutions also encourage user feedback and will rely on machine learning to constantly adapt to analysts’ style and preferences for superior end-user experience and satisfaction.

Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO of Yseop:

"In the finance industry, we receive multiple testimonies from our clients, highlighting how we help them transform the way they manage financial reporting, improving the efficiency of their teams by automating many of the previously manual, repetitive tasks and processes. As artificial intelligence is now becoming widely available, Augmented Financial Analyst is designed to make the technology available to large companies worldwide in a way that is cost-effective, scalable and truly valuable.”

Yseop initiated last quarter a series of breakfast briefings “YseopMorning,” inviting users of its technology to share their return of experience with the local community of actual or prospective NLG practitioners. The second installment will be taking place in Paris on February 25 in the presence of Capgemini and BPCE presenting Yseop Augmented Analyst case studies.

Path Solutions, the global Islamic banking software provider, today announced that Bank Assafa has gone live with the latest version of iMAL in its headquarters in Casablanca as part of its strategy to bring cutting-edge Islamic banking services to its new customer base.

Bank Assafa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Attijariwafa Bank in Morocco, specialising in participative finance. Founded in July 2017, the bank offers a range of ethical banking products, which are compliant with the Higher Council of Ulema guidelines. Among all Islamic banks in Morocco, Bank Assafa has the widest network in the country with 40 branches in 20 cities.

With the rollout of the AAOIFI-certified iMAL core banking platform, Bank Assafa will be empowered to not only realize its growth strategy in a cost effective way, but also to offer a complete array of Sharia-compliant products and services to its corporate and retail customers, and to continue working towards the bank’s vision to become the country’s leading Islamic bank.

Youssef Baghdadi, General Manager of Bank Assafa, said, “The project implementation has delivered a multi-award winning Islamic core banking platform that includes a comprehensive model bank enabling us to be fully compliant with local regulations. The market potential here is immense and we believe that the flexibility and scalability provided by the system will support Bank Assafa in its ambitious strategy to take innovative products and differentiated services to market rapidly”.

Today, Bank Assafa is the largest French user of iMAL. This latest successful implementation combined with a local support presence and commitment to the region will contribute to increasing the footprint of Path Solutions in Morocco and North Africa by extending participative finance services to a broader community of clients.

Mohammed Kateeb, Group Chairman & CEO, Path Solutions, commented, “Morocco is embracing inclusive Islamic finance and Bank Assafa will definitely be a key contributor in expanding this segment in the country and in West Africa as a region; therefore, we are delighted to be their strategic technology partner. As technology becomes the strategic driver in the financial industry, we believe that our AAOIFI-certified core banking platform, which is built on the latest advancements in technology, will contribute tremendously to the innovation while speeding up time to market for interest-free products and services to satisfy the Moroccan customers”. 

As part of the project scope, the following interfaces have been implemented onsite; Cheque and Bill Clearing interfaces with PROCHECK and GSIMT, HR interface, UTRF, Credit Bureau, CCB, DGI, CNSS, PPR, Incident Payment, Security Document (Cheque Printing), Compliance (Siron), and Office des Changes.

Furthermore, Path Solutions’ project team has ensured a successful transition of legacy data into the new iMAL system including Customer Creation, Account Creation, Islamic Deals, Standing Orders, Voided Cheques, Certified and Banker’s Cheques, Standard and ATM Hold of Funds.

The TALL Group of Companies, the UK’s leading provider of secure electronic and paper payments solutions is working with a growing number of high street banks that have all signed up as early adopters of UCN Plus^®, in a move designed to strengthen the industry’s protection against cheque fraud within the UK payments systems.

Martin Ruda, Group Managing Director at the TALL Group of Companies, said; “The fundamental change to the UK cheque clearing system with the introduction of cheque imaging in October 2017 has seen more attempts of fraud, as criminals pro-actively look for opportunities in the new Image Clearing System (ICS). We are delighted that  major high street banks,  including Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland Group are participating in the UCN Plus^® initiative and helping to ensure that counterfeit, forged and fraudulently altered cheques are robustly and automatically trapped and rejected wherever possible within clearing.”

The UCN Plus^® (patented GB2569173), is an Image Survivable Feature (ISF), that has been developed by The TALL Group in partnership with DIA Europe, providers of the Kappa cheque fraud prevention platform used by many of the leading cheque clearing service providers. It enables the variable payment data – payee name, amount, date, etc – to be encrypted and hidden within a unique QR code printed on the face of all ‘special’ cheques issued by the TALL Group on behalf of the cheque bureau customers of the ‘early adopters’, together with those who wish to infill their own cheques using in-house software capable of printing cheques or through TALL’s well established ‘Checkprint Solution’ software for Corporate and SME cheque issuance.

The information held in the encrypted QR Code provides validation of the details on the face of the cheque and can greatly help with fraud prevention when the cheque image is scanned and verified within the new Image Clearing System. 

In a move designed to support the fight against fraud in the UK cheque clearing system, TALL also announced recently that it was making its unique UCN Plus^® fraud prevention tool available across the accredited cheque printing sector, at no charge.

Martin Ruda added,  “As a Group, we strive to assist our customers and provide solutions that can improve their operations. We are actively engaged in a programme of product innovation and new customer services to build on the requirements for Image Survivable Features and will be announcing further developments as we move through 2020.”

 Finastra today announced that it has extended medical insurance benefits to partners of its LGBTQ employees in India, as part of its drive to create a diverse and inclusive workplace. Same-sex couples who live together are now eligible for the same medical benefits as co-habiting couples from different genders.

“We believe that people are most happy when they can be their true self – at work as well as at home – so we are proud to take this step for our staff in India,” said Mehjabeen Poonawala, Head of India at Finastra. “There is nothing more important than the health of a loved one, so we have made sure that our people know we support the ones they care about, no matter their gender. By extending medical insurance benefits to our LGBTQ employees’ co-habiting partners we are taking another step in fostering a truly inclusive culture at Finastra.”

This latest move is one of a number of Finastra’s diversity and inclusion initiatives in India – such as Women @ Finastra, which helps female employees reach their career goals through mentoring, networking events and professional development opportunities.

Finastra is also announcing that is has been officially certified as a "Great Place to Work" by the Great Place to Work® Institute.

More than 10,000 organizations from 60 countries apply each year for the certification, which is determined by a survey of a company’s employees. To qualify for the accolade, 70% or more of respondents must rate the company as a great workplace and score its people practices as 2.5 or more out of 5. The survey benchmarks responses to both qualitive and quantitative questions, focusing on trust (what level of trust an employee has in their employer) and culture (assessed against variety, originality, all-inclusiveness, human touch, and integration).

“Being recognized as a Great Place to Work is one of the most prestigious achievements for any company that truly cares about its people,” Mehjabeen Poonawala commented, “This certification reaffirms that our initiatives – such as extending insurance benefits to LGBTQ partners and offering extra career support for female employees – are succeeding in creating an inclusive workplace culture. Finastra is on a mission to become the most loved and diverse employer in fintech and this recognition proves our commitment to building a high-trust, high-performance environment. I want to thank all our employees in India for leading the way and ensuring Finastra really is a Great Place to Work.”

 Yseop, the world-leading AI software company and pioneer in Natural Language Generation (NLG), today announced the launch of Augmented Analyst, a new enterprise-wide NLG automated report generation platform. Augmented Analyst is designed to help financial companies accelerate their digital transformation.

Stemming from the imperative to move away from high-cost individual point solutions, Yseop leveraged over 10 years of experience in the field and invested into an important R&D program, working closely with industry leaders such as Sanofi, Moody’s and BNP Paribas to develop its Augmented Analyst platform.

Built on a unique synergy of advanced AI technologies, Augmented Analyst relies on a powerful industry-leading patented NLG engine and extended NLU and Machine Learning capabilities, to draw insight from structured data, translating them into clearly written reporting narratives. The technology is praised by end-users for the high quality of the human-like language output.

With a short learning curve and deployments reduced to weeks, rather than months, Augmented Analyst provides a new opportunity for enterprises to fast-track first NLG use case implementations. This is significantly reducing the time and cost of repetitive reporting tasks, with an immediate impact on the bottom line. The platform, scalable by design, can then seamlessly be extended to streamline from 1 to dozens of the most complex report automation processes, exponentially increasing ROI benefits for a lower total cost of ownership.

According to Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for Natural Language Generation Platforms, 25% of enterprises will use some form of natural language generation technology by 2022. Based on actual ROI findings collected across over 100 successful Yseop projects, scaling from single use case applications to enterprise-wide deployments could translate into billions in savings for the financial and pharmaceutical industries.

Developed with high levels of user-adoption as a driver, the new Augmented Analyst solutions come with a user-friendly Studio interface, providing intuitive drag-and-drop functionalities. The new interface was built to empower non-tech savvy business experts to design and configure reporting models based on their needs and across different business departments with no custom development. The solutions also encourage user feedback and will rely on machine learning to constantly adapt to analysts’ style and preferences for superior end-user experience and satisfaction.

Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO of Yseop: “In the finance industry, we receive multiple testimonies from our clients, highlighting how we help them transform the way they manage financial reporting, improving the efficiency of their teams by automating many of the previously manual, repetitive tasks and processes. As artificial intelligence is now becoming widely available, Augmented Financial Analyst is designed to make the technology available to large companies worldwide in a way that is cost-effective, scalable and truly valuable.”

Yseop initiated last quarter a series of breakfast briefings “YseopMorning,” inviting users of its technology to share their return of experience with the local community of actual or prospective NLG practitioners. The second installment will be taking place in Paris on February 25 in the presence of Capgemini and BPCE presenting Yseop Augmented Analyst case studies.

Ingenious today announces that its Infrastructure Ventures EIS Service has invested as part of a $6m A-series investment round in TeraView, the pioneer and leader in terahertz technology and solutions.

The investment is designed to ensure that TeraView retains its leadership in the growing terahertz market and continues to provide a high level of support to each of its customers across the world while also accelerating product & technology development, customer support, and sales & marketing by the Company.

TeraView is the leading supplier of terahertz systems to support semiconductor companies and their manufacturing partners in the implementation of advanced 2.5 and 3D packaging technologies for integrated circuits.

Terahertz light lies between infra-red and microwaves, and as such has unique properties which enables it to pass through objects and to transmit images and compositional (spectroscopic) information that is ordinarily hidden. Terahertz is non-destructive, safe and fast, making it the ideal inspection and imaging modality for many applications across a range of industries. For example, advanced packaging techniques allow compact integration of key components such as microprocessors, high bandwidth memory and graphics processors used in computing and data manipulation, providing a means of enhancing performance and minimising power and space requirements in mobile phones and other electronic devices.

All of the major semiconductor companies are now offering their own packaging architectures to differentiate themselves from competitors. TeraView’s proprietary EOTPR technology has been developed with its key customers as an important enabling tool in fault isolation and inspection of these new architectures.

TeraView is also the leading supplier of terahertz systems for the measurement of thickness of multi-layer paints used in the automotive and aerospace industries. New painting technologies such as wet-on-wet formulations are being implemented to improve automotive production line throughput.

Guy Ranawake, Senior Investment Director at Ingenious, commented: “The unique properties of terahertz light combined with the fact that it is non-destructive, safe and fast, make it the ideal inspection and imaging modality for a variety of applications across a range of industries. TeraView is the world’s first and leading company solely focused on this area and has demonstrated the potential of its proprietary technology through its team of dedicated engineers leading to it having the largest number of terahertz systems in the field. We are very happy to support TeraView and look forward to seeing the growth of the company which aligns strongly with our investment strategy and infrastructure sector focus.”

Dr Don Arnone, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of TeraView, commented: “The follow-on investment from Nordson DAGE, coupled with new corporate investors such as Wonik Investments in Korea, underscore the level of interest from industry in TeraView’s technology and solutions that we provide to our customers in our core markets. Support from new financial investors such as Ingenious in London, and Pathfinder H in Korea further demonstrate the global appeal of TeraView’s business to investors.”

The transaction was led by Ingenious’ infrastructure division and represents the fifth investment from the Infrastructure Ventures EIS Service, following the backing of 3D Repo the cloud-based digital platform design pioneers, Winnow, the technology company behind Winnow Vision, the artificial intelligence tool helping chefs cut food waste in half, Over-C, an analytics company focused on operational performance in the workforce management market and Reactive Technologies, a world leading technology platform facilitating the transition to a low carbon future.

 Global fintech company Paysend has partnered with Pakistan’s JS Bank to support the launch a new payment solution for freelancers. The ‘Freelance Wallet’ will enable freelancers in Pakistan, estimated at 1.15 million in number and earning in excess of $1 billion per year, to be paid on time and in full.

The JS Bank Freelance Wallet is an app-based solution to which payment can be sent using just a mobile number. The absence of relevant payment services in Pakistan has created much demand for a service such as this among freelancers.

With 1.4 million already using Paysend’s global money transfer service, Global Transfers, Paysend provides fast, secure and simple payment solutions. This expertise has been pivotal in the development of the Freelance Wallet.

Ronald Millar, CEO of Paysend said: “The JS Bank Freelance Wallet is powered by Paysend and brings a new level of security and speed when it comes to getting paid as a freelancer. Doing freelance work can be stressful without the right tools to ensure seamless administration. This new solution will help to empower freelancers across Pakistan by allowing them to manage their money from their smartphone.”

To open a paperless account and start receiving payments, all freelancers need to do is download the mobile app and visit a JCash branch to provide biometric authentication. Clients can then send money to the wallet using the freelancer’s mobile phone number. Money can be withdrawn via branchless banking agents, JS Bank branches or through ATM cards.

Noman Azhar, Country Head Branchless Banking & Digital Implementation at JS Bank said: “In line with the State Bank’s strategy, we are working aggressively on increasing the value proposition in the International Remittance space. JS Bank has provided freelancers with a practical digital platform to the to ease the fund receipt process without any extra cost. This is a game changing initiative and cements our position as a market leader.”

THETA, the specialist provider of buy-side trading technology as a service, has appointed Peter Meddemmen as its Chief Technology Officer. 

Industry leading technologist, Peter has more than 30 years of experience in Capital Markets managing technology for multi-asset solutions across the full order-execution life cycle, including front to back workflows, risk, security, legal and regulatory framework.

Peter joins THETA from Bloomberg, where he held several senior positions in the Trading Solutions team since 2007. Previously, Peter held CTO positions at City Index and GL Trade (acquired by Sungard in 2009). Earlier in his career, Peter was the VP for technology at Thomson Financial (now Refinitiv, jointly owned with Blackstone Group).

Peter will be responsible for all technology delivery, as THETA moves towards product launch later in 2020. Over the past 9 months, THETA’s next generation cloud native multi-asset trading technology blueprints and prototype have been validated by industry experts and leading asset managers, equivalent to $5 trillion AUM.

Abdullah Hiyatt, THETA Founder & CEO, commented, “Peter has a wealth of domain and technology expertise to drive our engineering capability as we prepare for our platform launch and execute our innovation strategy. He complements our growing team of senior industry experts that includes Co-founder and Head of Product, Paul Wallace, former Head of Fixed Income Dealing at Aviva Investors.”

Peter Meddemmen commented, “I am delighted to be joining THETA and to be part of a fantastic team. The post regulatory financial market and the implied costs have seen institutions forced to change their business model, a model which THETA fits perfectly. I am hugely excited to be part of this 'wind of change'".

THETA’s multi-asset O/EMS service for the buy-side will launch in summer 2020.