Covid-19 crisis: Lingua Custodia’s perspective

As most countries in Europe start to ease the population lockdown, it is now possible to assess the economic impact of the last two months. As a Fintech specialising in machine learning applied to financial translation, Lingua Custodia was ideally placed to observe the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on its ecosystem. And, more specifically, on financial institutions in Europe.

Thanks to the digital nature of our offering, we were able to continue to deliver our machine translation services without interruption during the lockdown. As a result, we saw an exponential increase in translation volumes over the last few months:

• February: 1.1 M words
• March: 1.6 M words
• April: 3.4 M words

International financial institutions with multilingual teams had to manage multiple crisis communications. Firstly linked to the ‘logistical’ impact of the crisis on the functioning of teams and the importance of reassuring their clients about the continuity of their operations. Secondly, the communication related to the financial impact on markets and investors.
Machine translation is particularly suited to crisis communication. The 2008 crisis was the catalyst for the creation of Lingua Custodia; with a clear objective of automatic and rapid expert translations in the financial domain.

Above all, financial institutions will need to continue to communicate with their clients while playing a leading role in the recovery of the economy. The end of the lockdown period poses many logistical challenges; team security, reviewed organisations and increasing costs caused by a constantly evolving situation.

Under these circumstances, we were delighted to support the financial ecosystem in managing the initial Covid crisis communication. Indeed, Lingua Custodia’s teams are working hard to help financial players reduce their fixed costs related to language services; while enabling them to meet the multiple challenges of the post Covid era.

Olivier Debeugny, CEO