Aylien wins first prize for innovation in financial services

Aylien, a provider of AI-powered risk intelligence and financial analysis solutions, has been named the Grand Winner of Deloitte’s Second Annual Financial Services Innovation Award.

Founded in Dublin in 2012 by Parsa Ghaffari, the company offers natural language processing and text analysis tools that can be used to summarize, categorize and extract meaning from large amounts of unstructured data.

Its platform uses AI to aggregate and understand thousands of information sources such as news, regulatory updates, corporate filings, and internal data sources, to provide early signals of ‘critical risk events that could affect an organization.

In addition to being named the overall winner of the awards, Aylien was a winner in the most disruptive fintech category. The company, whose clients include Moody’s, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Aon and Revolut, has raised € 7 million to date from backers Finch Capital, Atlantic Bridge University Fund, Sean O’Sullivan’s SOSV and Enterprise Ireland.

This year’s award winners were selected from a number of categories: banking, insurance, investment management, most disruptive fintech, social or sustainable entrepreneurship, and leadership.

Mastercard chief innovation officer Ken Moore took home the leadership award, while the other winners in a partially virtual ceremony Thursday night were Revolut, Hanover Re Ireland, Fund Recs and Mail Metrics.

Pioneers

The awards aim to recognize pioneers who use technology to meet challenges and create opportunities, improve the user experience, and change the way business is done. Deloitte organizes the awards in partnership with Financial Services Ireland (FSI) and Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI).

The awards were first awarded in 2019, but have been postponed to 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The big winner of the inaugural awards was global payments company Transfermate.

The jury consisted of BPFI Managing Director Brian Hayes; the chairman of the FSI, Furio Pietribiasi, who is also managing director of Mediolanum International Funds Limited; Carol Gibbons, Head of ICT and International Services at Enterprise Ireland; Ciarán Hancock, business editor of the Irish Times; Gulru Atak, Chief Innovation Officer, Citi; and David Dalton, partner and head of financial services at Deloitte.