Aylien takes top prize at financial services innovation awards

Other winners include Revolut, Hanover Re Ireland, Fund Recs and Mail Metrics

David Dalton, head of financial services at Deloitte Ireland (left) virtually presents the winner’s award to  Parsa Ghaffari, chief executive and founder of Aylien. Photograph: Andres Poveda
David Dalton, head of financial services at Deloitte Ireland (left) virtually presents the winner’s award to Parsa Ghaffari, chief executive and founder of Aylien. Photograph: Andres Poveda

Aylien, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered risk intelligence and financial analytics solutions, has been named as the overall winner of the second annual Deloitte Financial Services Innovation awards.

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

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

In addition to being named the overall winner at the awards, Aylien was the winner of 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, the Atlantic Bridge University Fund, Sean O'Sullivan's SOSV and Enterprise Ireland.

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

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

Pioneers

The awards seeks to recognise pioneers who are using technology to address challenges and create opportunities, improve user experience and changing the way business is done. Deloitte hosts the awards in partnership with Financial Services Ireland (FSI) and Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI).

The awards ran for the first time in 2019 but were postponed in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The overall winner of the inaugural awards was global payments company Transfermate.

The judging panel comprised BPFI chief executive Brian Hayes; FSI chairman Furio Pietribiasi, who is also chief executive 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, head of innovation, Citi; and David Dalton, partner and head of financial services at Deloitte.

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor is a former Irish Times business journalist