Seedcamp‘s Seedhack FinTech event at London’s Google Campus has drawn to a close and the project taken on for further development at Seedcamp combines financial lexica and semantics in order to make contractual risk analysis much simpler.
A big problem for companies is how to define risk. Contract negotiation means lawyers between parties are used to define terms but there are usually undefined terms and this can lead to ambiguity. Ambiguity can of course lead to litigation, which is expensive.
Over the weekend the winning team, Business Semantics, created a website that finds undefined terms in documents so that they can be absolutely defined and no longer present risk. This helps to avoid a lot of hassle for legal departments who would have to work on contracts where there is an issue with the wording.
It might sound like a simple idea but the databases to be created are vast, the semantics involved are pretty clever and the end result would benefit governments, risk officers, businesses and general councils. Most large corporations have master contracts, this is an extremely important area to “de-risk” documentation and where Business Semantics has its focus.
It’s fair to say that this was not the usual project presented at a hack weekend, but it is refreshing to see the issues and financial services that would be beneficial to big business along side financial and mobile ideas that individuals would find useful every day.
Runners up
There were of course other prizes and cheers for the participants. Delayed gratification app Sayved and virtual betting app MiniPots both came second for their presentation.
The main award for presentation and the one that made gained the loudest cheers was Holy Light. Holy Light is a charitable donation system for religious institutions where the congregation can not only give money via their mobile device, but they can also be sent news and blessings from that establishment’s religious representative in the area.
There were 12 pitches at the end of the weekend, so the many ideas that were brought to the event on Friday were whittled down. Many of the participants had barely slept and most people there made new friends and working teams to create something amazing in a short space of time.
Carlos Eduardo Espinal is a partner at SeedCamp. “We got a lot of innovation out of a space that has been ripe for disruption for a long time. There are so many issues that are still broken, people having trouble getting refunds, credit card security, the asymmetry in information between a manager of money and the people who have the money. Though there were great ideas over this weekend there are still a lot of problems to be solved.”
If you are a developer at a spare end, you could do worse than consider solving financial problems. The technology being used today is already very old and given the state of the economy and general financial affairs, it looks as though there’s plenty of work to do…and big money to be earned.
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