Present in Luxembourg since 2019, French firm Lingua Custodia is blazing a trail in natural language processing in the financial industry. CEO and founder Olivier Debeugny explains.
The 2008 financial crisis was a wake-up call for Olivier Debeugny, but not necessarily in the way that one might think. At the time, he was working for AXA Investment Managers and spending sleepless nights fielding calls from concerned investors.
“We had to communicate in 10 languages a piece of information we had received 30 minutes earlier. In my team everyone speaks English on top of their native language, so the patter was ‘I know it’s not your job but you’re Italian please translate this immediately into Italian. You’re Spanish, etc.’”
Debeugny later realised that marketing teams worked in a similar way when it came to communications and, frustratingly, translation agencies for the most part were little help because of the complexity of the language used. “There are just not enough people who have this skill, hence the need for technology.” he says.
The entrepreneur founded Lingua Custodia in France in 2011 to create a kind of Google Translate for the financial industry, using machine learning translation engines. Focusing on R&D, he gathered data to train a model. “We decided not just to create a translation engine for finance, but to choose various domains where there is linguistic coherence,” he says. With A Series funding limited to €100,000 at the time, progress was slow but in 2015, Debeugny quit his day job to launch commercially. The firm then won a place in the 2018 Luxembourg Fintech Awards, prompting the opening of their first international branch in Luxembourg in 2019.
“We decided not just to create a translation engine for finance, but to choose various domains where there is linguistic coherence.”
Olivier Debeugny, founder and CEO of Lingua Custodia
Developing Expertise
During the pandemic, Debeurgny and his 20-strong team used the time to develop their expertise further in natural language processing, NLP. It means that in June 2022 Lingua Custodia will roll out a new NLP platform, “not only proposing machine translation, which is ultra specialised and gives a better output than generic translation engines, but to propose other NLP services we are developing, such as speech to text transcription.”
Debeugny’s team is also working on text data extractions, from PDF documents for instance, and the possibility to look for some specific terminology in dictionaries.
Enterprise Solution
With the new platform clients can access the full gamut of services via intranet, benefiting from a simplified interface, so that the machine can identify which engines are best suited for the job. And Lingua Custodia will add audio transcription services in the coming months.
What makes the firm’s approach especially altruistic is that they make their NLP research public, publishing around two research papers each year. And the findings will likely have implications for years to come. Today, NLP analysis of quantitative data is driving demand analysis and trend detection across a range of topics. As Debeugny says: “There’s so much to do in this field!”
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Read the full digital version of the magazine on our website, here. You can also choose to receive a hard copy at the office or at home. Subscribe now.
