Data in finance event - Future Finance & FinTech West
This was another in the series of joint events between Future Finance and FinTech West which took place on March 27th. It was kindly hosted by Evelyn Partners (or as we should now say S&W for their professional services arm, which was launched on 31 March 2025) at their new offices in the EQ building in Bristol. We were looking at making the best use of data in finance from various aspects including surveys, competitive research, carbon accounting, getting ready for AI and the data journey.
Dominic Gibbs from Evelyn Partners (now S&W), welcomed the audience and also announced the launch of S&W before Jack Stanbury from Future Finance took the floor to provide an update on progress within the project. This included the Accelerator Model as it currently operates and a description of two newer areas of activity, namely the Innovation Discovery Workshop and the Innovation Adoption Consultancy. The Workshop has proved extremely popular with a range of financial services businesses of all sizes from across the country. There has also been a strong interest in the Consultancy as it is free to those seeking assistance with new products or processes.
Bayes Price's CEO Matt Gibbs gave us a rapid-fire run through of recent advances in data analytics. He shared the benefits of using survey data for insights in Financial Services and beyond. Bayes Price's intuitive AI-driven software can help marketers extract valuable insight from their data. With prestigious clients such as Sky using their services, Bayes Price are definitely worth talking to if you're looking to get the most from your data.
Having already worked on a number of activities within the Future Finance project as well as one of those providers of the consulting advice, it was great to hear from Tim Cryer about Behind Login’s approach. The biggest revelation to all was perhaps the fact that you only need to undertake 5 interviews for a specific topic in order to gain the vast majority of qualitive insight required before messages get repeated. Tim also outlined a few other key areas to focus on with some valuable key bullet points to follow.
Having by now covered the quantitative and qualitative areas of data surveys, Saara Benfield from Sage Earth was focussing on carbon accounting and how businesses can tackle this in order to become a better business in many ways including working effectively with the supply chain, increasing profitability and, of course, helping drive the business towards Net Zero. Sage Earth have a tool that allows organisations to undertake carbon accounting in a simple and cost-effective way as it uses AI matching to take out much of the previously required “leg work”.
Many organisations, especially SMEs, simply don’t know where to start with AI as there’s so many tools and hype going around. As Alex Smith explained, that’s where Data Cubed come in to help organisations answer key questions such as what can we achieve from AI, how do we go about it and how can we get our data AI ready. Alex explained some of the best practices and a simple to understand process to follow to help make it all happen.
Finally, we heard from Emily Li from Evelyn Partners (now S&W) explain that having more data can be a good thing to help provide value in a number of areas from productivity to competitiveness. She explained a methodology for approaching a “data driven culture” in some simple steps including a valuable case study for a property firm.
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