AI Team, led by Lingua Custodia, won the First Fintech Entrepreneurship Program

On December 5th, 2020 the AI team, led by CEO Olivier Debeugny, won the first Fintech Entrepreneurship Program competition, organised by the LHoFT and CFTE.

The Fintech Entrepreneurship Program is the first initiative of Luxembourg’s Digital Finance Academy, jointly built by the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (The LHoFT) and the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE).

Digital Finance Academy

The aim of the Academy is two-fold. First, to help financial institutions train their employees regarding new technologies in the financial environment. Second, to raise awareness on the changes faced by the financial industry and help professionals, masters or PhD students and policymakers apprehend these changes.

The AI Team

As a fintech, founded by finance professionals, Lingua Custodia naturally agreed to participate to the initiative and Olivier Debeugny stepped in as the AI Team Leader.

The AI Team was composed of the four following talents:

○ Roger Tafotie, Managing Director at Operxify, Former Associate Director EY, Professor in Law

○ Najia Belbal, Independent Director, Member Digital Committee at ILA

○ Loise Wandera, Senior Scientist at HydroSat & ESG specialist

○ Rosario Di Maggio, Former Director of Business Development at Vistra

The Challenge: fight greenwashing thanks to Artificial Intelligence

Alongside three teams, led by other prominent Luxembourg Fintech companies’ founders (LuxHub, Tokeny and Governance), Olivier and his team worked on an exciting case-study.

The goal was to take ownership of the case-study by developing a realistic strategy within the firm’s framework of available resources, considering sustainability goals, such as the problem of “greenwashing”.

We talk about greenwashing when a company or organization spends more time and money on marketing themselves as environmentally friendly than on minimizing their environmental impact.

To end this phenomenon, the EU is planning on issuing regulatory measures on sustainability-related disclosures in the financial services (EU Regulation 2019/2088).

The Solution: Ticked

To win the challenge, the AI Team worked on an AI-powered lexical tool based on ESG terminology, developed by Lingua Custodia. They named it “Ticked”.

As a SaaS (software as a Service) platform, Ticked can analyse marketing brochures or web pages and compare them to fund prospectuses for ESG terminology. As a result, it helps financial institutions detect, reduce, or mitigate greenwashing.

The technology behind Ticked is Natural Language Processing; a mix of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. A field where the members of Lingua Custodia’s Lab (Raheel Qader, Melissa Ailem and Jingshu Liu) are experts.

Lingua Custodia was able to give inputs and advice to the AI Team members for them to create a viable business plan.

The final pitch

The Fintech Entrepreneurship Program culminated with a final pitch session on Saturday 5th of December, gathering Luxembourg’s Fintech and Finance community digitally. The 4 teams delivered their final pitches, leveraging the input they had received from the program partners, experts, and mentors over the course of the program.

The AI Team, with their project Ticked, was finally designated as the winning team by the jury of experts.

Ticked received an official graduation certificate from CFTE, as the other participants, in addition to an access to the CFTE Entrepreneurship program and a free membership at the LHoFT to continue working on the project, and an opportunity to turn it into a reality.

Lingua Custodia is pleased to have been able to contribute to such a great initiative. We are looking forward to participating in new projects organised by the Digital Finance Academy.

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First Fintech Entrepreneurship Program by LHoFT and CFTE successfully completed