Societe Generale European Business Services invests in innovative solutions made by Romanian start-ups
Citește în continuare
Bucharest, 19th of September  2017 – Societe Generale European Business Services, part of the international group Societe Generale, had ended its first corporate accelerator program dedicated to start-ups in Romania – Catalyst 2.0.
Societe Generale European Business Services, present on the Romanian market since 2011, assumes in all its activities the four core values of the international group: team spirit, responsibility, innovation and commitment. To spur innovation, the company has organized Catalyst 2.0, a corporate accelerator program for Romanian start-ups where teams worked in Agile mode to develop technological products based on real use cases to solve some of Societe Generale group business challenges. The program lasted 10 weeks and the applications proposed by the participants were designed using new technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence or blockchain.
The program was developed on the Bangalore-Bucharest duplex where start-ups met Societe Generale management which expressed their ambition to get involved more and more in the Romanian local startup ecosystem. The collaboration between the parties created a win-win situation: the company tapped into the startups agility accessing new technologies and new ways of working while the startups got enterprise knowledge, confront their solutions with concrete business use cases and have the chance to further collaborate with Societe Generale group as a client. Also, each start up involved in the project received a financial support from Societe Generale European Business Services.
14 Romanian start-ups applied for the Catalyst 2.0 program and 3 of them where accepted. The start-ups are: AIception, Under Development Office and Ascentix Team.
AIception is a local fintech company that develops solutions like AIception (deep learning platform, image recognition), AIRE (credit scoring) and Woogie (assistant kids, bot). The problem they decided to resolve is about hundreds of daily tickets that need to be manually classified into 60 categories and 230 subcategories. The solution they picked is to use the power of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to classify them automatically improving speed & accuracy and reducing costs & time.
Over the past 6 years, Under Development Office has developed native mobile applications for Android, iOS, Windows devices, as well as web based applications. Starting with 2016, they have increased their portfolio by adding blockchain applications. They have chosen as problem the lack of automated Know Your Customer processes at different levels within the business, thus the challenge
to manage the data about different customers. And as solution they created a simple smart contract that manages personal information sharing.
Ascentix latest interest is focused on developing a set of data tools for big data handling and visualization. The challenge Ascentix opted for was automating the tedious manipulations of large Excel files with inter-changing data, a very time consuming activity for the Societe Generale European Business Services colleagues. They built data models over existing Excel data files, allowing business users to: define dynamic dashboards, provide meaningful data analytics and present conclusions to relevant stakeholders in a more friendly & flexible manner.
“The Catalyst program has been an important step for us but also a desire to demonstrate that the digital transformation of the banking system has become a necessity. By working closely with these start-ups we have discovered new ways of working and we have developed a collaboration that will bring many long-term benefits to both parties,†stated Philippe Garcet, Chief Executive Officer of Societe Generale European Business Services.
“We applied to the Catalyst 2.0 for the chance of developing and validating our ideas with a big corporate stakeholder, such as Societe Generale European Business Services. The experience so far was overwhelming. We had the chance to interact and work with innovative people that helped shape our solution. We also saw that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are technologies that draw more and more interest from corporate clients. Thus, AIception has a huge potential in delivering our vision of making AI accessible to anyone. Finally, benefiting from the guidance and support of the company we have managed to deliver a product that automates two processes while compiling with the high performance and security demands of the group. The delivered results are high: over 89% accuracy for the first process and over 92% accuracy for the second process. We will continue to evaluate and improve them.†stated the local fintech AIception
OTHER EVENTS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU
