Scottish Fintech Level E Research Leads the Charge in Satellite Data Innovation

Satellite Data for Smarter Decision-Making

Level E Research develops AI-driven solutions that help organisations make better, data-informed decisions. With this new funding, the company aims to extend its capabilities by integrating satellite data into its existing AI frameworks. This integration will allow businesses to benefit from real-time data that can significantly enhance their strategic planning, risk management, and operational efficiency.

The use of satellite data offers a wealth of possibilities, from monitoring environmental changes to optimising supply chains. For example, by analysing satellite imagery, businesses can gain insights into everything from agricultural yields to urban development trends, enabling them to make more informed decisions that are both timely and impactful.

Advancing Financial Services through Satellite Insights

Level E Research’s specialises in the financial services sector, where their AI solutions are already helping clients navigate complex market conditions with greater confidence. The addition of satellite data to their analytical toolkit is expected to revolutionise how financial institutions assess risk and predict market movements.

For instance, satellite data can provide valuable information on economic activities, such as the level of industrial output in a particular region or the state of infrastructure development. These insights can be crucial for financial institutions looking to invest in emerging markets or assess the impact of natural disasters on their portfolios.

A Collaborative Effort for Maximum Impact

The success of these satellite data pilots depends on collaboration across industries. By working with other organisations in the pilot program, Level E Research will be able to refine its models, ensuring that the solutions developed are both practical and scalable.

Moreover, the insights gained from these pilots are expected to have a ripple effect across various sectors, from agriculture to insurance, demonstrating the broad applicability of satellite data when combined with cutting-edge AI.

How Ionburst is helping to protect critical data in a hybrid world

“It’s critical financial institutions consider how they can best mitigate risk. With Ionburst’s platform, we’re working to give organizations control and visibility over their data everywhere. IBM Cloud’s focus on compliance and security is helping us make this possible and enabling us to give customers confidence that their data is protected ”“ which is critically important in the financial services sector”

Introduction to Scottish fintech Alluvie

Article written by Emmanuel Bernieri, founder and CEO at Alluvie

It’s a safe bet for me to assume that most of you have already had conversation with a friend, acquaintance, or relative about cryptocurrency or the current stocks skyrocketing everyone’s talking about. You may even have spent at least a few minutes daydreaming about investing some money, doing THE smart move, based on your greatest hunch, and multiplying your investment by 2, by 10 or more in a matter of weeks.

Perhaps Tesla should be the horse you should bet on? Or what about Gamestop? Dogecoin?

Lately, new brokers have entered the game, such as eToro and Robinhood. Their marketing is impeccable. Their ads keep popping up on our feeds on all the apps and websites we use, making us the very sweet promise only 0 fees trading app can make.

Because as non-professional traders, we are their target.

Indeed, today the market of non-professional investors (also known as retail investors) is booming. More than 100 million individuals around the world are investing money on financial markets. A booming market! But there is a catch: a recent large-scale study focusing on this emerging market has shown that, on average, 80% of us, retail investors, will lose money on financial markets. Less than 1% will be profitable in the long run. It’s a lesser chance than winning the Hunger Games, if you’ll allow me. Sure, trading can be a hobby!, but the hard cold reality is coming right back at us. It’s not magic, and it can’t be just luck. Skills are required and it can even be a full-time job for some of us. You may need mathematical skills, coding ones, or even law, geopolitics, etc.

 While most people believe that trading is just knowing the right information before anyone else, the reality is different. 99 times out of 100, being a good trader means analyzing a situation and trying to balance the risk/reward inherent to the situation. Guts, glitter, and speedy heated arguments phone calls are just completely outdated since we’ve entered the era of algorithmic traders. Now, a professional trader/team of traders build and rely on algorithms able to define when to buy and when to sell a selected financial asset.

Nowadays, we estimate between 60 and 80% of the share of total orders on the US market that comes from algorithms. The problem with algorithmic trading is that it requires hundreds of hours just to build your coding environment to test your trading strategy properly.

This is the main reason why, at Alluvie, we have decided to build a platform where anybody can test their ideas on historical data before executing it. In a nutshell, we are taking care of all the technicalities. Thanks to our platform, you can test ideas on the fly without having to know how to code. You just need to write your rules of buying and selling (when to buy and when to sell) and then select the assets on which you want to test your strategy, and that’s it. You will automatically access the backtest of your strategy and you will be able to assess the quality of your idea before
making a bold move without prior knowledge.

Of course, we know that lots of retail investors don’t really know what their strategy could be. That’s why we are continuously creating trading strategies that are free to use by any of our members and we also develop a marketplace where other retail investors will rent their trading strategies to others. Finally, we are also developing direct bridges with brokers to fully automatize your strategy, if and when you are happy.

Our goal is to make your investment safer, easier to manage and more profitable in just a few clicks, with no hassle, no hidden hurdles and as few steps as possible. The platform is already live. You can register now and test it for free for 1 month.

Don’t waste your time trying to “feel” the market!

Join us and make the right move today. We are waiting for you. Welcome to trading 3.0.

How fintech AccessFintech is enabling multi-party collaboration

Blog written by Andrew Mill, Synergy Trainer at AccessFintech

Who are we?

Access Fintech was established upon a profound desire to bring self-service, transparency, risk mutualisation and efficient supply-chain management to the global financial services industry. Our founders, Roy Saadon and Steve Fazio, started the business in 2016 and we currently have over 120 employees across offices in Glasgow, London, New York, and Tel Aviv.

Our leadership team has a proven track record in building businesses and products that change the face of financial technology and operations. Since inception, AccessFintech has seen multiple client onboards and product launches, been awarded Capital Markets Start-up of the Year by Financial News in 2021, and we now manage over 1 billion transaction updates per month.

What challenges did we see?

Middle and back-office functions in financial services typically centre around significant internal and external email, Excel, chat, and telephone exchanges across numerous participants to share data, request and provide status updates and resolve exceptions. Add to these processes an array of internal systems individually managed by each financial institution, each of which require significant ongoing maintenance, development, and operational staff training.

The redundant practice of sending an email followed by a chaser and then an escalation phone call has been the industry norm for years. The follow up process of sending further chasers’ and looping in additional contacts has resulted in a communication breakdown across Teams, Counterparties and Markets as a whole. A myriad of Do you know?’ and Please amend to match’ type queries have been deleted, filed, and quite frankly ignored. The lack of shared systems means that clients lack the data transparency they need and therefore cannot self-serve due to being unable to view statuses, commentary or even track exception resolution progress.

The bottom line is that this way of working increases the chance of error beyond what it has to be. This fundamental issue is why AccessFintech exists, and solving it is how we supply massive value to our clients..

How have we solved them?

To achieve better efficiency, financial institutions must break the limitations of their four walls and embrace a collaborative approach to industry-wide challenges as they emerge.  This is why we built our Synergy platform.

Synergy was designed to release massive, locked value that firms cannot unlock individually. Data transparency is at the centre of the Synergy network’, which offers self-service data solutions to users that extend and enrich their datasets, allow them to share data across workflows, and provides technology across the transaction lifecycle to increase transparency, speed resolution, reduce fails, and benefit from valuable benchmarking insights.

Synergy provides a single, secure environment for multi-party collaboration and is underpinned by three core capabilities: Data Collaboration, Workflow Optimisation and Technology Distribution.

Data Collaboration: Collaborating in the AccessFintech User Interface means all participants are communicating in the same place with no communication lag and all interactions are systemically audited. The UI also allows for clients’ workflow lifecycles to be managed efficiently and automatically generates information for users that shows them areas of inefficiency, importantly, what the root cause is. AccessFintech Synergy DataLake’ enables collaboration across different companies as well using data and shared technology access. In other words, everyone gets to see a single source of truth, no matter what organization they work for.

Business as usual needs to change, not just for one institution, but for all. As such, Collaboration advances the entire ecosystem by automating operations, reducing capital requirements, and speeding workflows.

Workflow Optimisation: The AccessFintech UI delivers solutions for transaction automation, resolution, and decision-making in a multi-provider environment. Users are granted the ability to digitally execute interactions from purchase to settlement to payment in one place. Consequently, workflows and workforces can be optimised by letter users better evaluate and manage risk, recommend solutions, share workloads, and track actions.

Technology Distribution: AccessFintech is focused on seamlessly delivering continuous technology-driven operational transformation. Benefits can be realised across entire organisations simply by leveraging the power of data and collaboration. Organisations have reduced the total cost of ownership of technology resulting from data aggregation, enrichment, normalisation, and distribution to relevant stakeholders.

Once part of Synergy, individuals and organisations alike have the power to onboard new technologies with minimal complexity, resulting in dormant system retirement and the adoption of a cloud support strategy.

Concluding Remarks

AccessFintech enables organisations to share data securely with appropriate stakeholders, whether internal or external. At its core, data is paired across participants via the network to support efficient exception resolution. This notion is underpinned by customisable risk profiling and data transparency, allowing for prioritisation and significantly reducing incoming and outgoing queries.

In other words, our clients’ financial workflows are systematically organized. Structured communication protocols permit seamless collaboration on exception resolution and the creation of report and analytics to support root cause analysis and future fails reduction. We help organisations benefit in multiple ways, most notably: System Transformation, Cost Reduction, Risk Reduction, Enhanced Client Service and Digital Solution.

Fintech Aiming to Help Businesses Access Cash Faster

A new Fintech, Saltare, has just launched with the ambition to help businesses improve cashflow, strengthen supply chain relationships and give more certainty over payments.

Saltare is headquartered in Bristol and employs people around the UK including Scotland. It was created because 82% of businesses fail through difficulties of accessing cash (there is currently a whopping £200bn tied up in unpaid invoices). Saltare is about incentivising buyers to pay early, and in giving them the tools and reasons for doing so.

The solution comprises mobile-led technology to allow buyers to manage their entire supply chain in a way that works for them and their key suppliers. Saltare will address the needs of some of the more challenging sectors and industries, where extended supply chain are the norm (public sector and local authority bodies through to retail and construction).

Chief Executive Anthony Persse says:

“By shifting the debate away from the negative commentary around late payment’ and moving it towards a more positive conversation about early payment’, we will do much more than simply improve payment performance. We will help create more jobs, deliver greater levels of investment and generate deeper social value with long-term sustainability at a time when the country needs it most.”

“Our mission is to develop a series of tools that bring the certainty of payment, and the certainty of cashflow, that support both ends of the supply chain. Bigger than this, our mission is to change the mind-set of businesses once and for all, to embrace a new approach that is simple to make, and yet will have positive consequences for future generations”

Discover Zing, the fintech reinventing insurance

Zing is a fast-scaling, advanced insurtech backed by leading global insurers. At our core is what matters most to our customers and partners by offering embedded insurance cover at the e-commerce checkout of leading retail brands.

Whilst the majority of consumer insurance cover is purchased online, the online insurance market is confusing, dominated by generic products, confusing applications, mystifying policy documents and an overwhelming reliance on margin eroding price comparison.

We put relevant insurance cover at the e-commerce checkout of the brands that our customers already know, use and trust.  Our cover is embedded alongside or prior to finance or BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) providers which not only increases buyer commitment but the frequency and value of the purchase. Our intuitive modular product design means our customers receive insurance that truly resonates with their purchase or hire.  Our simple API enables customers to get peace of mind insurance cover with as little as one click’ at the checkout without ever leaving or disrupting the e-commerce checkout flow. Our customer portal empowers our customers to manage, grow and customise their cover and most importantly, make claims all in one place.

There’s additional revenue for our partners as well, as a subscription-based platform, Zing also provides our partner retailers with year-on-year cumulative revenue for as long as our partners customer remains a customer of Zing’s.

Zing is looking to partner with consumer facing retailers that want better customer outcomes from their e-commerce platforms, insurance brokers that have commercial customers but want a value add to further enrich the relationship and create new revenue sources, e-commerce agencies / advisors and e-commerce payment services providers.

We are delighted to be working with FinTech Scotland and please do get in touch should you wish to find out more.

Introducing mnAI to the fintech ecosystem

mnAI is a multi-award winning data, insight and analytics platform that provides information on all unlisted companies in the UK. It is the UK’s largest and most comprehensive source of data – a single, unified source that holds 10bn+ data points on 8m+ UK companies. We apply a wide variety of machine learning algorithms and filters so users can access targeted, customised information and insight across industries, sectors, and geographies far more rapidly than is currently possible.

The platform is used by, amongst others, investors, advisors, corporates, professional services, government and educational establishments to improve their insight and efficiency, to enhance and support their operations across several departments, while at the same time reducing their costs.

Ricky, our Managing director in Scotland, tasked with growing the business in Scotland and beyond said:

“With Edinburgh being named as one of the UK’s leading tech cities we are delighted to have become part of the Fintech Scotland ecosystem. Stephen Ingledew and Nicola Anderson have done and continue to do a remarkable job and the whole team at mnAI look forward to developing a very long-standing and close relationship with the Fintech teams across the UK. The power of data is now more valuable than ever and we believe the mnAI platform will only add value to strategic partners across the UK.”

To find out more about our platform and technology please visit us at mnai.tech