Buy vs Build Software – ‘To be or not to be that is the question’!

The Buy v Build software dilemma for AI is a very pressing challenge for our financial clients. Skills and software are needed to build an inhouse solution, whereas purchasing the solution can be faster, though it might be more difficult to customise the solution to fully meet business requirements and there might be concerns about data security and privacy.

We asked our Our Head of Sales Frédéric Moioli, his thoughts on the Buy vs Build Software debate.

1) Lingua Custodia’s solutions are a ‘buy’ option, so how can we ensure our solutions match our clients’ needs?

Lingua Custodia’s solutions are uniquely positioned to match client needs due to several key factors:

Expertise and Innovation

Lingua Custodia leverages extensive expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI ensuring solutions meet specific client challenges. Our dedicated Research & Development department, The LAB, drives innovation by developing new applications and keeping our products at the forefront of technology.

End-to-End Control

We maintain control over the entire value chain, from creating custom Large Language Models (LLMs) to rigorous data management and training. Our secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tool addresses crucial data security concerns.

Verto Platform : the one stop shop platform

Our advanced platform, Verto, serves over 10,000 users, integrating AI-powered tools for translation, transcription, data extraction, and efficient document analysis. By combining expertise, continuous innovation, comprehensive control of AI development, and a powerful platform, Lingua Custodia effectively aligns its solutions with the evolving needs of financial sector clients

2) How does Lingua Custodia help its clients considering a ‘build’ option?


At Lingua Custodia, we’re not a consulting house ; instead, we leverage our extensive expertise in AI technologies to support clients in the financial sector. Our LAB partners with the innovation labs of our clients on AI research projects.

Since our founding in 2011 by finance professionals, we have developed a deep understanding of our clients’ pain points. This allows us to customize AI models to meet their unique requirements effectively. The LAB’s innovations include the development of our cutting-edge Document Analyser, a generative AI tool designed for efficiency without requiring massive investments.

By providing secure, innovative solutions, we empower clients to enhance their operational efficiency while ensuring data security and compliance. This approach enables us to deliver high-quality, domain-focused solutions that align with the needs of the financial industry.

3) What is Lingua Custodia’s competitive advantage?


Lingua Custodia’s competitive advantage stems from several key factors:


At Lingua Custodia, we offer unparalleled security for our clients. Unlike many competitors, we don’t rely on public cloud services. Instead, our solutions are hosted on physical servers located in Europe, ensuring the highest level of data protection and compliance with strict financial industry regulations.


Our team consists of dedicated and versatile professionals with deep expertise in both finance and AI technologies. This unique combination allows us to understand the intricacies of financial operations and develop tailored AI solutions that address specific industry challenges. We are ultra-specialized in finance, having been founded by finance professionals in 2011. This means we don’t just understand AI; we intimately know how the financial sector works. Our deep industry knowledge allows us to create solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing financial workflows and address real-world pain points.


Our LAB, our dedicated Research & Development department, keeps us at the forefront of AI innovation. It continuously develops cutting-edge applications tailored to the financial industry’s needs.


By combining our secure infrastructure, specialized team, deep financial expertise, and continuous innovation through our LAB, we offer a unique value proposition that addresses the specific needs of financial institutions in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Lingua Custodia wins the Large AI Grand Challenge Award organised by the European Commission!

AI award

Lingua Custodia wins the Large AI Grand Challenge

The French Fintech company Lingua Custodia, a specialist in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to Finance since 2011, was delighted to receive an award in Brussels yesterday. This award, which was presented by EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, is designed to reward innovative start-ups and SMEs for devising ambitious strategies and making commitments to develop large-scale AI foundation models that will provide a competitive edge for Europe.

Together with 3 other technology SMEs, Lingua Custodia will share a prize of a total of €1 million and access to two of Europe’s world-leading supercomputers, LUMI and LEONARDO for 8 million hours. This challenge was highly competitive and received 94 proposals.

Lingua Custodia’s AI foundation models

Lingua Custodia’s winning proposal focused on developing a series of AI foundation models with 3 major objectives, using the company’s existing skills and known expertise in the AI arena:

  • Build very cost effective, fast and efficient models to run on smaller servers and democratize the technology while reducing energy consumption
  • Ensure the models can handle multilingual queries and make them available to non-English speakers
  • Tune the models for the retrieval of information (RAG) to enhance the usage of generative AI for multilingual knowledge management.
Lingua Custodia’s focus on cost and energy efficient AI foundation models


Olivier Debeugny, CEO of Lingua Custodia, declared to Thierry Breton: “Lingua Custodia is an AI company, that has raised a modest amount of capital since its launch. This has been a catalyst for our creativity and resourcefulness and we therefore have the skills to optimize everything we develop. This is why we have been working on the design of multilingual, extremely cost and energy efficient models to be applied to an AI use case with a high Return on Investment.”

About Lingua Custodia

Lingua Custodia is a Fintech company leader in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Finance. It was created in 2011 by finance professionals to initially offer specialised machine translation.

Leveraging its state-of-the-art NLP expertise, the company now offers a growing range of applications: Speech-to-Text automation, Linguistic data extraction from unstructured documents, etc.. and achieves superior quality thanks to highly domain-focused machine learning algorithms.

Its cutting-edge technology has been regularly rewarded and recognised by both the industry and clients: Investment houses, global investment banks, private banks, financial divisions within major corporations and service providers for financial institutions.

Lingua Custodia’s Generative AI Multi-Document Analyser

 

Multi-Document and Multi-Lingual Data Extraction 

Lingua Custodia’s Multi-Document Analyser is now in production and can be accessed via the secure platform or through API.
This means that a group of documents can be uploaded at the same time, with key information extracted within seconds. As this technology is also integrated with our machine translation engines, it is possible to load your documents in different languages and extract your data using a different language prompt.

As an example, French, Chinese and Spanish documents can be uploaded and you can ask your queries in English or any other language which is supported by the platform.

You can upload up to 15 pdf documents together. The technology has been optimised to read and extract information in tables and to respond swiftly to queries.

What are the uses cases for the Multi-Document Analyser?

The use cases for the multi-document analyser include financial product and regulation queries, client support queries, requests for proposals and due diligence questionnaires. So, it is possible to upload a group of Key Investment Documents and extract the risk performance indicators and other details.

Lingua Custodia focuses on innovation

Lingua Custodia is very proud of this highly innovative technology which is part of a suite of financial processing services it provides. It was set up by 2 financial professionals in 2011, originally to provide specialised machine translation services, having identified a clear use case for this service.  Since 2020, new technologies, such as speech to text and data extraction, have been added progressively.

 Its aim is to be the market leader in financial document processing for financial institutions, and Lingua Custodia is distinguished by its focus on data security as it recognises that this is a priority for its clients.  Data is stored on bare metal servers in Europe.

 

Lingua Custodia features on the Wavestone radar for French Generative AI Startups 2023

Generative AI

Lingua Custodia was delighted to feature on the Wavestone Radar for French Generative AI start ups in 2023.

What is the Wavestone Radar?

Wavestone is an international global consulting company, which has a start up accelerator focusing on emerging trends in the startup ecosystem. It shares the results of these market insights through the publication of Wavestone Startup Radars.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of model trained to spot pattens in data, which enables it to then generate new content based on the previous patterns.  So, for example in the finance industry, Generative AI models can be used to analyse trading and investment data, identifying patterns to generate trading opportunities.

Lingua Custodia

Lingua Custodia is included on the Generative AI radar within the ‘Gestion de la Connaissance’ category, because of its focus on financial document processing and its range of technologies for data extraction and analysis.

It is a huge achievement to feature on this radar.  Lingua Custodia was initially created in 2011 by finance professionals to offer specialised machine translation.

Leveraging its state-of-the-art NLP expertise, the company now offers a growing range of financial document processing solutions in addition to its initial Machine translation technology.

Lingua Custodia’s document analyser, uses Generative AI applied to a large language model (LLM) model to search for specific information in confidential documents, extracting and then summarising the information.

The key advantages of our document analyser is the rapid extraction of the relevant data in response to a series of queries. The document analyser is multi-lingual, available in 10 languages. This allows you to query a document in a different language to the one it is written it. The use cases for the document analyser include requests for proposals, regulatory, compliance, research and security documents.

The source references are also included which helps with verifying and checking the accuracy of the responses.  The ability to query several documents at the same time will be developed and live on the platform by the end of Q1 2023.