The Full List: Which Law Firms + Tech Co.s Won Innovate UK Funding?

Law firms such as Weightmans, DLA Piper, Withers and Kennedys – plus US law firm, Sullivan & Worcester, as well as legal tech companies readers will already know, such as Autto, Legatics and Thirdfort, and many others, have shared in a major funding round run by the UK Government, which is very keen to support legal tech, and especially legal AI.

The Government created a new pioneer fund worth £20 million last year to help create new opportunities for businesses and researchers to work together to develop ‘the next generation of services for the accountancy, insurance and legal industries‘. It has now published the full list of those projects it has decided to grant funding to.

The funds have been dished out by Innovate UK, which is part of UK Research and Innovation. Below is the full list, with the legal tech applications first.

Overall, it’s a very impressive collection of projects, which if they all came off would certainly boost the legal AI and legal automation segment of the market in the UK and beyond. So, let’s hope all that taxpayer money results in some positive outcomes.

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Legal Applications

Intelligent Voice

Automation and Transparency across Financial and Legal services: Mitigating Risk, Enhancing Efficiency and Promoting Customer Retention through the Application of Voice and Emotional AI

Partners: Intelligent Voice Ltd, Strenuus Ltd., University of East London

Funding awarded: £1,361,570

Insurance fraud cost the UK £3 billion in 2017, increasing 8% since 2015, equating to £10,400 per fraudulent claim, causing an increase of £50 per policy. Current manual processes to identify illegitimate claims are non-user friendly.

Current advanced emotional AI technologies capture (non-verbal) human expressions via computer vision, voice analysis and/or biometric sensors and are unable to understand both vocalics and linguistics. No current solution combines AI and voice technology.

The partners aim to develop AI software that detects and interprets emotion and linguistics from voice, developing a vocal AI technology for credibility/vulnerability assessment, key word spotting, in-call behavioural guidance and transparency of the decision-making process, trialled by an insurance contact centre during live claims handling.

This will offer a breakthrough technology for the anti-fraud sector, simultaneously providing unique expertise to the UK in deep neural networks and AI with cross-sector potential.

With Innovate UK support, the 30-month programme will result in trialling the technology, with project success supporting commercialisation by 2021.

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Genie AI

Enabling rapid adoption of artificial intelligence through an anonymized data protocol and explainable models

Partners: Genie AI Ltd., Barclays PLC, Imperial College London, Professional Insurance Agents Ltd., University of Oxford, Withers LLP

Funding awarded: £1,539,451

Two of the greatest obstacles towards adoption of AI in UK services is the acquisition of confidential data, and the explain ability of black-box neural models. This collaborative project will include academics, large commercial partners and Ginie AI, a machine learning start-up. Commercial products that advance state of the art algorithms will be developed, drawing on the latest body of research in computational privacy and machine learning.

The technology will be researched, tested and trialled in a commercial setting. Key stakeholders and regulatory bodies will be engaged with to provide an industry wide protocol of how to enable access to data for the rapid adoption of machine learning in services.

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Moorcrofts/Oxford Brooks

Improving Legal Services Productivity and Accessibility with Artificial Intelligence

Partners: Moorcrofts LLP, Oxford Brookes University

Funding awarded: £304,468

As a result of legal services being expensive, many companies and individuals do not engage with a legal services provider when agreeing contracts.

This project is to research the feasibility of a legal contracts management system that uses AI to simplify the process of legal contract review, dramatically reducing the time taken to review, negotiate, and manage contracts. By implementing this as a cloud-based solution we plan to offer its capability as an online legal service to SME’s and legal firms to enhance their productivity in negotiating legal contracts. If successful this will significantly reduce the cost of UK legal services and redress the imbalance across those businesses that can afford legal services and those that can’t.

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Data Solver

Transforming Data Protection via the development of AI integrated privacy management systems for lawyers

Partners: Data Solver Ltd., Cranfield University, University of East Anglia, University of Kent

Funding awarded: £279,450

In 2017/2018 incidents of personal data breaches reported by UK organisations to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) increased by 30% compared to 2016/2017, with incidents including accidental or unintentional human errors.

Data Solver’s privacy management software is designed to enable organisations to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Its competitors offer siloed manual data-entry applications which lack automation. These therefore rely on subjective judgements (e.g., the accurate identification and classification of personal information) and are prone to errors by employees. As a result, there is strong regulatory-driven market need for an automated software solution that can facilitate swift and cost-effective compliance with the GDPR. Through this project, it’s proposed to undertake work that:

• enables efficient ongoing privacy management through automated, data-led, decision making and risk management
• puts the privacy of individuals at the heart of its solution and in order to reduce the risk of breaches to individual’s personal data and
• provides legal firms and their clients with a comprehensive, advanced solution to enable them to reduce the costs of compliance management via the scalability or the provision of ‘Data Protection Officer (DPO) as a service’

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Legal Beagles/IBM

Global Access to Justice via AI & Community

Partners: Legal Beagles Group Ltd., IBM Ltd.

Funding awarded: £262,343

This project seeks to provide easy access to legal answers, support and community advice enhanced by AI technology, which can analyse and scale knowledge to predict best routes for consumers to find solutions to legal issues.

The objectives are to provide quality legal support in a cost-effective manner, to a global population that is increasingly struggling to gain access to justice and consequently researching online to find answers to legal matters.

The LegalBeagles forum has been operating for over 11 years, providing free legal advice to consumers and with 800,000 posts providing answers to a range of legal issues. It currently relies on a group of dedicated volunteers providing legal support to consumers. The increasing volume and complexity of legal issues requires a huge increase in corresponding dedicated volunteers in order to meet the demand for support. The use of AI offers an ‘endless capacity’ to locate legal knowledge faster, identify new patterns and trends, whilst at the same time helping consumers with their legal issues.

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MatterLab / Weightmans

MatterLab – Predicting Matter Costs and Reserves

Partners: Frontier Labs Ltd., Weightmans LLP

Funding awarded: £165,874

This project will combine human centred design and artificial intelligence to create a system that augments and guides Legal experts when forecasting the costs of legal cases.

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Orbital Witness

Legal & Property Language Processing

Partners: Orbital Witness Ltd., HM Land Registry, University of Southampton

Funding awarded: £312,748

AI techniques will extract and analyse legal rights and obligations related to property and land. The project lead will use this information to support the creation of “Legal Risk Scores” (similar to credit risk scores) for all property and land, revolutionising real estate practice in the legal and insurance sectors.

It will increase transparency in understanding legal issues affecting property, speeding up the time in which lawyers can identify legal risks, and improve the standardisation of real estate risk assessment to allow for insurance policies to be issued in a more simple manner.

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Teal Legal 

Development of AI Conveyancer to facilitate instant conveyancing

Partners: Teal Legal Ltd., Keele University

Funding awarded: £136,982

Each conveyancing transaction for buying and selling houses in the UK can be drilled down to three core elements: data (gathering together data relating to the property in question); decision (applying conveyancing rules to that data to decide whether the property is ‘good and marketable’ and whether the deal should proceed); and transaction (if the answer to stage 2 is yes, proceeding to complete the transaction).

This project is aimed at the second stage of the process.

HM Land Registry are taking very positive steps towards automating the ‘data’ and the ‘transaction’ elements of conveyancing with their Digital Registers and E-Transfers systems, however, no organisation, public or private has yet addressed the question of how AI can improve the ‘decision’ element of conveyancing. That is what this project intends to do.

The project will build a prototype tool to establish whether AI and technology could improve on the current ‘due diligence’ decisioning process to decide whether properties are good and marketable. It will also conduct research to establish how this will fit into the current industry requirements, and impact insurance and regulatory requirement.

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SmartPolicy / Kennedys 

Partners: Kennedys Law LLP, Chrysalis Analytics Ltd.

Funding awarded: £254,716

This project, a collaboration between Kennedys Law and Leap Beyond, will produce a new tool for the insurance sector to enable insurers to draft consistent new policies and/or additional clauses to existing policies without the reliance on lawyers.

We will develop machine learning algorithms and neuro linguistic programming (NLP) techniques that ensure policies are created to consistent standards and that evaluate policy documents and aid clients in understanding the amendments. The savings we create for insurers will be passed on to UK policyholders, who are subject to some of the highest insurance premiums in the global insurance market.

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Solomonic / Warwick Uni

Applying AI-based solutions into high-value litigation

Partners: Solomonic Ltd., University of Warwick

Funding awarded: £309,144

Solomonic enables litigation professionals to use structured, systematic data analysis when making litigation decisions. This is done by methodically analysing and indexing court documents based on a large number of criteria. This enables legal professionals to speed up litigation research and provide structured insights.

Data collection to date has been very manual and time-intensive. We estimate that for each case it currently takes roughly three hours to collect and validate the data collected (with large variations depending on the complexity of the case). This is very expensive and will limit the speed at which Solomonic will be able to grow. Maintaining the accuracy of the data that we collect is vital. This project will investigate the feasibility of applying machine learning algorithms to the large-scale collection of accurate data from court documents.

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Thirdfort – Data driven property fraud prevention

Partners: Thirdfort Ltd.

Funding awarded: £50,006

In 2018, property fraud is a £120million problem in the UK, and law firms are increasingly having to spend time and resources to fend off cyber-attacks.

The project will build an AI driven algorithm that can be used by property lawyers to detect fraudulent property transactions in real time, protecting property buyers, sellers and lawyers.

Transaction specific fraud data gathered from law firms such as Mishcon de Reya and others recently hit by fraud will form the training data for our AI algorithm. From this data we can identify the typical characteristics of a fraudulent transaction. For future transactions, our AI will process a range of specific transaction data and compare it to the identified characteristics of fraudulent transactions.

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Beale & Co / Swansea Uni

The Intelligent Automation of Contract Analysis of Collateral Warranties

Partners: Beale & Company Solicitors LLP, Swansea University

Funding awarded: £280,212

Reviewing Collateral Warranties (a type of construction industry contracts) is an important part of commercial risk management and can be legally complicated. Automating it could be very beneficial. Current contract review software is largely machine learning-based and cannot achieve the detailed legal analysis required and how it achieves its results is often opaque.

Prototype contract review software will combine both machine learning and rule-based approaches in an innovative way. The project will harness the high level review power of machine learning to identify manageable parts of contracts and the close precision of rules to analyse the legal content those parts in detail.

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Transparently 

To investigate the use of AI techniques to augment the the role of legal professionals during negotiation

Partners: Transparently Ltd.

Funding awarded: £138,352

This project is to investigate the application of AI techniques to the analysis of conversational data, to augment the role of legal professionals during any discussion, negotiation or dispute resolution. transparently will focus initially on family law (specifically separation and divorce).

The project will investigate and seek to gain the know-how, to enable future tools to be developed to support next generation services; a machine-supported ‘second opinion’, during emotional and difficult negotiations. The intention is to remove potential bias and offer greater transparency in legal decision making.

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AUTTO

AUTTO: Micro-Automation Platform for the Professional Service Sector

Partners: ABS Technology Ltd., University of Exeter

Funding awarded: £293,540

Autto Ltd proposes to deliver an innovative and accessible workflow automation solution for legal departments, law firms and professional services. It aims to deliver increased workflow efficiency freeing professionals to concentrate on advising clients, having a positive impact on both the professional service organisation and their clients improving efficiency, reducing errors and enabling the launch of innovative services.

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Lexograph. [note: it’s not really clear what this actually is, but apparently it helps map out corporate structures.]

Partners: Lexograph Ltd.

Funding awarded: £133,982

The project looks to utilise and incorporate artificial intelligence and data analytics into the visualisation product in order to deliver greater functionality and value to users. The project will research and develop a number of opportunities for innovation. The end product is to have developed a data proof-of-concept system that can be incorporated into our product, significantly enhancing functionality and helping to accelerate the growth of our business.

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Affordable Legal Advice / PSU

Partners: ETIC Lab LLP., Court Based Personal Support, Solicitors Pro Bono Group, The RCJ and Islington Citizens Advice Bureau

Funding awarded: £182,256

For the volunteers and staff who provide support through advice agencies on legal problems, there is an urgent need to explore the complex network of interlocking and overlapping services. For these service providers, knowing where the client has been before, what advice they’ve received, whether they have acted on that advice, what assistance other agencies can provide, whether the other agencies have capacity and the justice outcomes of the clients they help is crucial.

This project will explore both the possibility of advice charities sharing data to understand their user’s journeys and where users would benefit from being guided into the wider legal services market.

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Legatics / DLA Piper

Increasing AI adoption rates in the UK legal and high-value services sectors through use of AI microservices and behavioural change science

Partners: Legatics Ltd., DLA Piper International LLP, Exchange House Services Ltd., + 2 individual experts names withheld here

Funding awarded: £173,318

This project recognises that AI models can achieve good technical performance but that adoption is primarily held back by organisational and behavioural factors. The project addresses the organisational factors using a new architecture of ‘AI microservices’ and the behavioural factors with the application of behavioural change science.

This project takes the novel approach of providing highly specific and pre-trained models, termed “AI microservices”, which are built into existing workflow software used by the sector. It aims to build and integrate six AI microservices into the high-value legal practices of the project partners and measure the adoptability of the resulting technology. The project starts with application within the legal sector to benefit from the consortium’s sector specific knowledge and reduce contain complexity and costs.

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Satoshi 

Development and commercialisation of an AI, ML and data enabled online commodity trade finance platform (Athena)

Partners: Satoshi Systems Ltd., Sullivan & Worcester UK LLP

Funding awarded: £279,077

The project will develop a platform which will be able to make existing legal practices more efficient using intelligent machine learning software to use the historical data of the previous commodity trading transactions to provide a suitable legal framework.

AI will be used to complete the due diligence checks, alongside blockchain technology to produce a self-executing smart contract reducing the manual work of an experienced lawyer and ensuring the privacy of all stakeholders involved. This in turn will enable trading on the commodity market which will increase competition, their productivity and the knowledge and skills of their business.

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Lawli

Partners: Le Change Studio Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,986

The project aims to reduce and eliminate existing barriers in legal services across the ecosystem, to make legal services more accessible and reduce the overall costs, time and resources commitments to pursue justice and promote fair market behaviour.

Powered by the latest natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms, the project aims to develop and make available the most accurate and easy-to-use legal services covering a range of legal areas to law firms and businesses.

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AOS2 [note: not specifically legal, but clearly of use to all law firms.]

Instant Beneficial Ownership Visualisation Checks (Using AI and NLP)

Partners: AOS2 Enterprise Ltd.

Funding awarded: £89,312

Current anti-money laundering (AML) compliance processes for verification of beneficial-ownership are challenging – they are labour intensive, manual, repetitive and data intensive tasks, which are vulnerable to human error. The project will create a beneficial ownership platform in the form of an online electronic identity verification service, reporting real-time automatic detailed visualisation of the structure of company ownership, identifying connections between customers and their owners.

The project will use AI to trawl publicly available data, in both structured and unstructured forms, automatically validate an entities full ownership structure in real-time, and compare it with the information supplied to the relevant organisations. This information can also then be cross-referenced against international sanctions lists and watchlist databases.

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Help Andi [note: not specifically legal, but appears to have a legal dimension re. risks]

Leveraging open data & AI to protect UK SMEs

Partners: Digital Fineprint Ltd.

Funding awarded: £140,413

It is imperative that small business leaders understand the risks that they face on a day to day basis and be given the tools to protect themselves.

Whilst data is often available, it is hard to find and to digest, and is time-consuming. A single point combing multiple sources of data and showing how this data is being used and acted upon in a simple, quick and easy to understand way, is much needed.

The project will build an online data management and oversights tool, leveraging some of our existing capabilities that use open data and AI. It will help bring transparency and clarity to all UK SMEs regarding their online footprint, and how this data is used and monetised by the wider insurance sector. It will be offering insights on up to 50 open data sources divided in to categories such as company profile, financials, risks and customer sentiment analysis using natural language processing analysing social media and review scores.

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Insurance, Accounting and Other Professional Areas

Pozibot

Partners: Pozibot, Brill Power Ltd., Delta Motorsport Ltd., University of Lancaster, Quantum Base Ltd.

Funding awarded: £1,846,736

This project brings together organisations involved in battery development from university to a battery pack manufacturer, to a leading FCA regulated Insured Warranty provider from the insurance sector. The aim is to enable a new type of insured warranty to be developed. It will enable partnerships between insurance providers and smaller (local) battery pack suppliers developing next generation batteries.

Cells and battery level suppliers need a warranty to get their products to market. The warranty provider needs the data to provide the insured warranty. Project Pozibot will deliver a warranty, supporting a significant UK industry initiative at each point in the supply chain.

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Thank Intelligence

Thank Intelligence Project: Meeting Minutes Automation

Partners: Thank Intelligence Ltd.

Funding awarded: £110,083

The objective of the project is to automate the process of taking minutes so attendees can focus on important conversations, improving interactions and allowing artificial intelligence to perform high quality minute-taking. The project will use pioneering technology for minute taking.

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Fluidly 

The Development of an Artificial Intelligence Recommender System for Advisory Service Provision at Scale

Partners: Fluidly Ltd., Baldwins Holdings Ltd., The Sage Group PLC

Funding awarded: £1,416,126

Traditional accountancy functions are becoming increasingly automated; from bookkeeping to reconciliations and reports. The current challenge for accountancy companies is how to utilise technology and the deeper data insight capabilities on offer to create new opportunities to engage with customers and to open new market channels.

Data analysis is time-consuming and requires new skill sets. The challenge in offering an advisory service across the client base is how to analyse client data directly from cloud servers.

This project will develop a Client Advisory Insight Engine (CAIE), a web-based client engagement solution to enable resource efficient remote monitoring of SME clients’ financial performance across an Accountancy firm’s client portfolio. CAIE utilises AI to recommend advisory actions for accountants to open timely advisory conversations with their clients.

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Uplift

Next Generation Services Small CR&D projects public descriptions

UPLIFT – Utilising Processing to explore Insurance Fairness using Telematics

Partners: The Floow Ltd.

Funding awarded: £115,687

The project will strengthen the UK’s position in the motor insurance sector. The goal is to grow new understanding of risk, in greater detail, directly from driving telemetry, minimising the usage of traditional insurance proxies, which are less easy to justify and potentially unfair to end users. Its goals are to enhance the delivery of personalised and easier to understand insurance products. The project focuses on:

1. Fairer Risk Estimation (to enable improved and fairer pricing)
2. Fairer Fraud Estimation (to add new aspects into support of fairer processing)
3. Enhanced Driver Feedback (to lower risk and improve care of the policyholder which can strengthen policyholder relationships)

Overall the UPLIFT project seeks to empower improved and fairer insurance products making mobility smarter and safer for all.

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Insuretechnix

Disrupting the cybersecurity insurance market through a technology and business model play

Partners: Insuretechnix Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,940

Cyber insurance is one of the most dynamic and fastest growing areas of insurance today. Yet, when a company applies for cyber insurance, it is still required to complete a questionnaire (paper or phone) providing generic information. As premiums are high, many elect not to insure or find themselves under-insured/not covered for a particular risk.

This project applies AI/data techniques (‘cybermatics’) to the UK cyber insurance market. A cyber risk detection product has been developed which collects risk data from business devices. We will apply AI to this data to enable UK insurers to better price cyber risk premiums and reward good cyber risk management through reductions in insurance premiums. This project will:

• Help the UK defend and grow its position in cyber insurance;
• Bring in new models, boosting competitiveness with insurers from the Far East and Asia who are beginning to exploit markets beyond their borders;
• Reduce exposure to cyber-attack which is a net public good, and increasingly crucial in an age where these non-conventional attacks are prevalent by rogue states.

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Inrobin

A Real-time Digital Platform for Industry 4.0 Manufacturer Insurance

Partners: Inrobin Ltd., University of Strathclyde

Funding awarded: £257,340

The manufacturing sector is moving into a new era and the service sectors, with their technology based products, have to be able to keep up with these developments. In this project, partners are aiming to create a digital insurance product for industrial machinery based on real-time data and analysis with significant predictive power that will transform insurance services in manufacturing, bringing all round benefits to UK: reduction in inefficiencies, risks and costs. The technology will be marketed to insurers and manufacturers.

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Beyond Green

Technical Feasibility and Market Validation for a Sustainable Business Assurance Platform for Accountancy Firms

Partners: Beyond Green Advisors Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,807

Adding to the accountant’s business toolkit and skill set, whilst drawing on their analytical skills, theArena17 will help reduce impacts on jobs from the automation of their core services; automation driven by the growing uptake of cloud-accounting and digital reporting.

Beyond Green, founded by a Chartered Accountant, is well placed to lead this transformation. TheArena17 will allow unquoted companies to understand their sustainability credentials and communicate them to investors/stakeholders. The automation will give all British businesses access to valuable services not widely available.

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Oasis-CAIMAN

Partners: Oasis Hub Ltd., Cranfield University

Funding awarded: £291,934

The proposal is to develop an insurance software that can accept, analyse and review drone collected visual images to a high level of accuracy for loss and damage after extreme events e.g. flood, severe windstorms, tornado, landslide etc.

The project will test a 3D image recognition system for flood extent, flood depth, building and infrastructure impacts of events and also link to a citizen/ claimant-led app based claims database. The tool is intended to become a licensed software for the Insurance (loss adjustment/ claims) sector, and can be further developed as an emergency damage assessment and payment system after extreme events, as well as used to simply observe building and infrastructure damage.

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Reducr

Developing a data driven cost management solution to transform accountancy

Partners: Reducr Ltd.

Funding awarded: £87,564

Cost analysis is time consuming, expensive to provide and to purchase, with cost management analysis only performed by a small niche of accountants. Two in three UK businesses overpay on their utilities, paying £1bn over the odds on this category alone. Accountants are experiencing market pressures from the automation of their core services, and need to provide new advisory services to counter this threat.

Reducr provides a unique business cost saving service delivered through accountants. The data needed to find businesses better deals is stored in their accounts. The rapid adoption of cloud accounting software creates an opportunity for a new form of cost saving service. Working with accountants they will connect to a client’s cloud accounting platform, finding key billing data, generate quotes from alternative suppliers, benchmark the client’s spend and deliver a report to the accountant. Accountants can package and sell the service in any way they choose to. The project will automate the cost savings analysis that we currently perform manually.

The project will provide accountants with an additional service to sell to their customers. It will create over £4.4m in incremental cost savings for UK businesses and produce £250k in incremental revenue for Reducr in the 12 months following project completion.

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Orpheus 

Transforming the insurance sector through AI and ML enabled cyber Risk prediction

Partners: Orpheus Cyber Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,981

Using AI and machine learning to predict cyber Threat activity and enable accurate Risk assessment.

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distriBind

distriBind – Intelligent Premium Income Prediction for Carriers and MGAs

Partners: distriBind Ltd., Vesuvio IS Ltd.

Funding awarded: £129,902

distriBind is transformative platform allowing Insurance Providers to share information quickly and more accurately and delivering AI-led analytics and forecasting. This project will enable distriBind to research, test and develop a proprietary algorithm to deliver forecasting and anomaly detection around insurance premium income.

This information will provide better business planning, assist compliance with new accountancy standards under IFRS17, and help ensure insurance capacity is available in the market.

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Recap

Recap – cryptocurrency accounting

Partner: Recap Technologies Ltd.

Funding awarded: £135,136

Recap is an upcoming software product for cryptocurrency accounting, providing accountants, consumers and businesses a simple, intuitive and privacy-focused way of tracking, analysing and reporting on their cryptocurrency finances, providing clarity of their tax position. Recap will ingest data from numerous large data sources and perform automated data techniques including classification, matching, aggregation and modelling in order to provide an accurate and comprehensive dataset ready for further analysis and reporting.

The product will save users significant time in collating, calculating and understanding cryptocurrency finances, increase data accuracy and provide new insights.

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Tapoly

Tapoly- bespoke insurance platform for sharing economy participants

Partners: Tapoly Ltd., Beazley Management Ltd., University of St. Andrews

Funding awarded: £302,489

Self-employed and freelance workers represent 15% of the UK workforce, with insurance products being generally rigid, difficult to change and unable to cope with flexible working requirements.

Pay-as-you-go insurance options are emerging but so far only cover non-business risks (household, motor, travel). The majority of the target market works in:

• IT and technology, e.g. freelance software engineers, testers and project managers
• Marketing & Media, e.g. photographers, copywriters, editors and web designers
• Management consultancy, e.g. financial services, marketing and sales
• Miscellaneous e.g. personal assistant, personal development coaching and keynote speaking

The outputs of this project will include designs and test implementations for the Oracle chatbot and advanced risk calculation engine. Within the many types of insurance available, Tapoly will offer several products to freelancers, of which we expect Professional Indemnity (PI) to generate greatest revenues.

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Ditto 

Ditto Tax: AI-driven automated tax advice using enabling knowledge acquisition methodology

Partners: Ditto AI Ltd., Devclever Ltd.

Funding awarded: £179,045

As the world moves towards automation, a growing market across multiple sectors is ‘automated advice’. It is difficult to provide a holistic automated advice solution for financial advice due the requirement for human interpretation of the rules to a specific case.

In order for an automated advice model to be successful, the algorithm underpinning it must be completely accurate in the application of expert knowledge, be able to address every possible scenario, and also provide an audit trail of how the ultimate recommendation was determined. Consequentially little innovation has occurred in automated advice provision in more complex tax areas due to the guidance widely varying in different scenarios.

Ditto AI have developed a unique knowledge acquisition methodology, free from interviewer dependency that can produce a computable output that exhaustively documents an individual’s decision-making & encodes their entire expertise on any subject.

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Flowerpot

Project Flowerpot – Creating beautiful things on the edge

Partners: Intercept Services Ltd., Control F1 Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,881

Intercept IP will seek to transform the motor insurance market through the development of the next generation of in vehicle telematics devices, incorporating video capture together with automated video image processing and analysis and use an AI safety scoring algorithm hosted within the telematic device. This AI will feedback to drivers factors influencing their overall driving safety including acceleration, braking, handling intensity, proximity to other vehicles and accommodation of external conditions.

The level and quality of data available will enable Intercept IP to develop automated driver identification software and report highly detailed crash characterisation data. The highly detailed nature of crash data available will also help insurers with claim resolution processes as reliance on driver recollection is negated by the availability of data.

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Capitalise

Capitalise.com – Using cloud data to monitor client portfolios and deliver next generation advisory

Partners: Platfi Ltd.

Funding awarded: £89,118

Capitalise Monitor will assess cloud accounting and OpenBanking data through data analytics and machine learning, guiding and prompting advisers on: which clients to approach; and topics of conversation for client groups with beneficial products from a wide marketplace.

In accountancy, cloud accounting solutions are replacing bookkeeping and compliance activities, in insurance data models are able to quote on evermore complex scenarios and in law routine services such as conveyancing can be achieved with software driven template services. Professional services need technology which offers them additive revenue to replace lost revenue to technology providers – we call this a cloud advisory platform.

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Xavier

Xavier Ecosystem Feasibility Study

Partners: FD Works Ltd., Hatch Apps Ltd.

Funding awarded: £267,388

Building on an existing product providing technical, time-saving tools and reporting for finance professionals using cloud accounting software, the project will investigate the feasibility of producing a much broader suite of products that combines data from a wide-range of sources, to increase the chance of success for small businesses in the UK.

The key objectives of the project are to: identify, clean up and blend a number of data sources, including private data from our users and large public data sets, into an accessible database; build a Proof of Concept analytical engine that employs artificial intelligence and big data techniques to extract accounting insights from the database; provide a web application user interface that presents these insights to businesses and their financial advisors, enabling them to understand their business performance and evaluate and model future business decisions.

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INNOVACC

Partners: Invetya Ltd., Kapitalise Technology Ltd., Telesto IOT Solutions Ltd.

Funding awarded: £279,715

The project partners will develop a platform centralising management of the finance function for companies, through seamless integration with accounting software and AI backend. INNOVACC will reconcile accounting and financial information. It will increase efficiency and transparency in accounting and reporting of innovation related finances.

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Bewica 

Self-learning Cyber Risk Insurance Engine (SeCRIE)

Partners: Bewica Ltd.

Funding awarded: £139,827

Cyber risk quantification has been a challenge for the insurance industry due to limited historical data and the highly dynamic nature of cyber risk, and cyber insurance is a product which is hard to access for some businesses.

The project aims to address this by combining AI, data science, cyber security and economics into a single end-to-end underwriting platform to quantify cyber risk and financial impact. An algorithm has been developed based on machine learning, which was used to predict the likelihood of a specific business suffering a cyber breach over a 12-month period.

Bewica will offer a platform which provides SMEs real-time updated risk assessment, management and insurance services. Cybernaut will also provide insurers with tools for more accurate and real-time risk selection/pricing.