Meet Squirro, a Zurich, Switzerland-based provider of augmented intelligence based on unstructured data and natural language processing (NLP), and a mission ‘to deliver insanely great returns on enterprise data’ by providing customers with the right information at the right moment at the right place, automatically.
The company was set up in 2012 and works across industries including banking and finance. Core to its platform is an Insight Engine that augments search technology with AI to deliver relevant and context-aware insights. Data is gathered from internal, external and premium data sources using data connectors, the engine understands and analyses the data by applying multiple AI and ML models, and users can act on the data using recommendations and visualisations.
The platform can be used in the cloud or on-premises, with use cases falling into categories including cognitive search, risk insights, marketing insights and sales insights.
Fabio Settimo, a Squirro account executive and one of a handful of company staff based in London, says: “One of the main challenges in financial services is information overload, essentially too many data sources. The Squirro platform augments what a person does and automates it by consolidating data and using NLP and automation to identify data that is available to users, perhaps a potential bankruptcy or change of CIO at a company.”
Squirro has a number of capital markets users that represent about half its total client base, which is for the most part in its own locality, although it also has active offices in London, Germany, New York City, and Singapore, and a total of about 400 employees. The recent acquisition of a US startup deal sourcing platform, open.exchange, is expected to extend Squirro’s reach in the US and expand its technology capability.
Among Squirro’s investment banking clients is Standard Chartered Bank, which wanted to provide actionable information to its relationship managers, stop contacting customers to catch up, and instead be data driven and provide a more efficient route to market. A project led by Synechron in partnership with Squirro and the bank, and based on the AWS cloud in Asia, achieved an award-winning minimum viable product (mvp) called Client Insights that provides front-line sales with curated and actionable insights to unlock new opportunities. The mpv is now being scaled to an enterprise solution.
The Bank of England is also a Squirro client, although on-premises, and is using the company’s platform as a solution for ‘an unstructured data mountain’. Most recently, in the final quarter of 2021, the European Central Bank (ECB) contracted Squirro to supply its Insight Engine and Risk Insights solution to help the bank gain contextual insights and recommendations to support supervisors in assessing bank risks.
Commenting on the ECB project, Dorian Selz, CEO and co-founder of Squirro, says: “We work with some of the world’s biggest and best-known banks and regulatory institutions, confirming our position as a trusted augmented intelligence company. Our Insight Engine overhauls enterprise access to information, providing relevant and context-based results to improve the efficiency of business processes. In addition, our Risk Insights solution provides more effective risk mitigation, supporting the digital transformation processes in financial services institutions.”
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