Doquit Technologies LrD and Planda AI have won the Smart Data Foundry and FinTech Scotland UK Fintech Challenge, designed to encourage data-led innovation and accelerate the development of products to assist with Later Life financial planning.

Each companies were awarded a prize of £45,000 to develop their ideas. Doqit Technologies developed an app to help people manage their life-admin more easily, and Planda AI won for their mission to increase financial wellbeing.

Both companies were among six finalists which were given a chance to improve their financial solutions and products with synthetic data from Smart Data Foundry, which replicates data relating to consumer banking, investment and savings products.

By doing so, they were able to test their innovations before presenting them to some of the largest financial institutions in the UK, including NatWest Group, PwC, and Royal London.

Doqit’s life-admin app was born out of Catherine Ann Reid’s struggle to manage life admin while caring for her daughter Chloe, who has a rare genetic condition. Drowning under mounds of paperwork, hospital appointments, and tax returns, she embarked on a journey to create a single, simple, place for people to manage their day-to-day life admin, such as monitoring bills and tracking insurance policies and multiple pensions.

“We really enjoyed working on the FinTech Scotland and Smart Data Foundry challenge,” Catherine Ann said.

“It supports Doqit’s mission of simplifying the overwhelm of day-to-day life admin. We believe people being more organised, and having better control of their important financial documentation, plays a significant part in ensuring they are more financially prepared for living a longer life.

“The synthetic data allowed us to create personas, and envision the introduction of machine learning into doqit’s next phase. This will streamline the process of recording a huge chunk of life admin into doqit using Open Finance and more APIs. Thank you to FinTech Scotland and Smart Data Foundry for their support and to the partners NatWest, PWC, and Royal London for sharing their wider challenges and use cases. Congratulations to all short-listed, and Planda on receiving their award.”

The other winner, Planda AI, has designed an AI and machine learning financial wellbeing platform which transforms the way financial services firms engage with their customers about their finances.

Using machine learning models, it analyses people’s behavioral patterns to predict how and where individuals will end up financially, helping banks guide customers toward more financially secure paths.

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“Thank you to FinTech Scotland for supporting us in this challenge,” Sam Brown, founder of Planda AI, said.

“Later life wellbeing is something very close to our heart, and the UK is sleepwalking into a big problem. We are on a mission to make money human, combining behavioural and artificial intelligence to help the industry understand how people feel about money.

“Smart Data Foundry’s synthetic data set, combined with our AI profiling technology, has been invaluable in allowing us to prove out key hypotheses related to peoples’ financial trajectory in life.

“Working with NatWest, Royal London, and PwC helped us better understand some of the challenges and opportunities they are facing, and we have met some other fantastic start-ups along the way.

“Congratulations to Doqit on their award alongside Planda.”