Meet the people: Q&A with the mastermind Barry Haddow, head of Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Aveni
Tell us about yourself. What was your career path before you joined Aveni? After a PhD in mathematical physics, I went to Dublin to continue my research. Whilst I was there, I got more interested in computers, so I took a conversion course, and joined a software consultancy at the time of the Celtic tiger. […]
Meet the people: Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Aveni: Mark Caulfield
Tell us about yourself. What was your career path before you joined Aveni? My background is with start-ups and building out companies. When I was much younger, I developed games for Sinclair Computers and automation software for manufacturing. I started my first company in 1999, building software for call centres and retail industries. Back in […]
Meet the people: Q&A with one of Aveni’s super-talented NLP Engineers: Tom Iddon
This week we caught up with Tom Iddon, an NLP Engineer at Aveni. We dive into how he went from the world of academia to becoming an engineer at Aveni. He joined the company in February 2020 and has a degree in MSc Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh. Here’s what he […]
Hybrid Advice: Optimising Client Support in the Midst of a Crisis
The growing pressure on advice firms to consider how best to use digital within their operating models is not new. Efforts to attract the mass market, expectations of younger investors and the need to reduce costs have all formed pressures to date. Many firms have been reluctant to adopt the technology due to uncertainties around […]
Man v Machine: Will Human Advisers be Obsolete by 2030?
Many industries’ operating models have been forced to digitise in recent months. Even sectors that typically resist innovation, understand that they have to adapt quickly or face ruin. Despite digital transformation initiatives being fast-tracked to the top of the to-do list, the move to digital is actually nothing new. Robo-advice, for example, is a well-trodden […]
Meet the people: Dr Lexi Birch
Dr Lexi Birch, is officially ranked as one of the top 100 Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineers in the world. She is a Senior Research Fellow at The University of Edinburgh School of Informatics and Head of Aveni Labs. Her research on machine translation has made a significant impact on the field with methods she […]
Meet the people: Iria del Río
Iria is our newest computational linguist, she will be working on data annotation and development for on-going projects. Having started her career at the University of Santiago de Compostela with a PhD in Linguistics, she has worked in academia and industry, developing NLP resources and tools, diving into linguistic data to extract the most from […]
The Transformative power of NLP for the financial advice industry
Dr Lexi Birch is one of the leading experts in NLP, a Senior Research Fellow at Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics and Head of Aveni Labs. She explains how the untapped power of NLP holds the extraordinary transformative potential for the Financial Industry if applied in the right way. We’ll begin with the basics: […]
Meet the team: Phil Williams, NLP engineer
This week, Aveni welcomes Phil Williams to the team! Phil is our newest NLP engineering expert. He started his career as a QA engineer in the semiconductor industry before becoming a software engineer. In 2008 he returned to university to study for a masters in speech and language processing. After completing a project on machine […]
National advice gap will be filled by financial advice firms daring to go digital
The industry has long been aware of the advice gap. A recent report revealed just 9% of British adults have a financial adviser which means there are 11 million adults with pensions and investment products but no expert guidance. However, the effects of lockdown have meant “…customer appetite and acceptance of video calls has increased […]
Meet the people: Welcome to Anais Trope, our newest engineer!
This week, Aveni welcomed Anais to the team! Anais is our newest engineering superstar: a coffee lover, martial arts expert and definitely not a mathematical genius, she started her career in 2019 and worked at a marketing agency before joining Aveni. Learn a little more about our newest member… What led you to this […]
Aveni secures £520k funding to transform professional advice with AI technology
Scottish fintech AVENI has secured seed investment of £520,000 for its ground-breaking video conferencing based AI technology, which will transform client interaction in financial and professional advice sectors in the new age of ‘digital client service’. The investment, led by the TRICAPITAL angel syndicate, will accelerate AVENI’s growth, initially focused on the financial services […]
