TheMarketsTrust was established to evaluate the credit risks of listed and non-listed companies, SMEs and large corporate organizations. Its specialty lies in its ratings, which are recalculated on a daily basis. The ratings include an index which reflects the sentiment/perception of end users.
This index, known as the TMT-Index, is extracted from sources like the daily news as well as social media. The company’s methodology is non-intrusive and relies only on openly-available data that is collected from over 20,000 different sources. TheMarketsTrust makes use of advanced machine learning algorithms (neural networks) for scoring.
TheMarketsTrust advisory board has vast experience in the development of highly complex, state-of-the-art and mission-critical solutions. Recently, the company has been approached to integrate its corporate credit scoring technology on the blockchain via smart contract. Such opportunities enable the company to contribute to the next revolution.
The TheMarketsTrust recently won two awards, RegTech 100 and RegTech 50, which have contributed significantly to its worldwide branding. The explosion of cloud services, coupled with the need for artificial intelligence (AI) as infrastructure services, has allowed TheMarketsTrust to reduce its time to market as well as the operational cost of its solution.
About the Trailblazer
Evangelos Papadopoulos, the CEO of TheMarketsTrust, is married to Rusiko, a Constitutional Lawyer, and is the father of two daughters, Elizabeth and Stephanie. He loves music, has learned to play the piano, devotes his free time to family life, and has recently adopted two cocker spaniels. Evangelos has always been passionate about science and technology and began programming when he was just 13 on a TRS 80, where he learned BASIC and other assembly languages. He now holds a Master’s degree in Engineering, a DES in Computer Science, a certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF Wilmot), and an Executive MBA (PLD14) from Harvard Business School.
Beginning his career as a developer, Evangelos has accumulated over 28 years of experience, including 18 years in finance, where he worked as an IT architect and project manager for Major Exchanges. He has managed projects with budgets as large as 50M € and virtual teams of up to 250 people.
For the past 10 years, Evangelos has been fascinated by new developments in Behavioral Finance, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematical Fractal Modeling, and their applications in everyday life. He is particularly passionate about the ability of neural networks to understand non-linear relationships, as well as the application of fractal geometry in day-to-day financial modeling.
The Differentiating Factor
Incumbents are still using mostly human-driven manual processes, which are very time intensive and sometimes subjective. In addition, with the explosion of the data economy, humans are unable to effectively analyze very large quantities of data. For instance, an Analyst requires an average of two days to get the data and give an opinion on a corporate.
On the other hand, TheMarketsTrust’s approach simplifies the original data so one only needs an average of two hours to complete an analysis.
All incumbents currently use the same approach for risk valuation, which makes it is impossible to get an independent second opinion of any consequence.
TMT stresses that this is a major shortcoming. Their solution is to provide a real second opinion that is based on machine learning (AI) and advanced quantitative models reevaluated on a daily basis.
The company’s models are far more accurate than existing ones. It has been established that classical models have an accuracy ratio of 65%, whereas TMT’s AI approach offers an accuracy ratio greater than 90%.
This is a major achievement that allows it to be more predictive, as well as to create new types of loans that rely on a continuous assessment.
Out of the Woods
The last two financial crises have changed TheMarketsTrust’s perception of the financial world. Both crises pushed millions of individuals and companies into bankruptcy and people began to question why nobody had predicted such catastrophic events. As a technologist, Evangelos was intrigued by the pursuit of a technological answer to financial crisis prediction.
After a year of research, Evangelos built the first risk model that combined quantitative and behavioral data. The results were promising; Evangelos and a group of friends decided to launch a startup dedicated to financial risks analysis. The result was TheMarketsTrust.
Five major institutions have already found TheMarketsTrust’s technology to be very promising and have expressed their interest in pilot projects.
Hurdles Crossed
“Getting the first paying customer is one of the most critical and challenging tasks for a startup. Most startups have limited funds and often build a Minimum Viable Solution (MVS), which requires an additional year of development. However, the financial industry is looking now
mostly for production grade products. To me, that explains why so many startups are failing”, says Evangelos.
Evangelos explains that the major stumbling block for him during the initial days was to identify early adopters. This can take months and requires a global network that, as a startup, he did not have.
Furthermore, four years ago, artificial intelligence technology was not as reliable; most frameworks have now improved radically and many are provided ‘As a Service’. Lastly, funding was an extremely difficult exercise and required a full-time dedicated resource.
TheMarketsTrust has grown by leaps and bounds over the years after having tackled these challenges.
Future Endeavors
TheMarketsTrust has developed a new scoring model for SMEs. It will be integrated within a new credit marketplace for serving SMEs by providing them a lending service while also providing social interaction features. The new platform targets five million entrepreneurs in the U.S. and another five million in Europe.
TMT plans to launch the MVS by Q4 of 2018. It is looking for additional partners and institutional investors to support the commercialization of this new platform whose services can be accessed via cloud APIs.
Furthermore, the integration of its offering within the blockchain would disrupt the current credit lending industry.
Evangelos says, “We are open and willing to work with the current industry and anticipate major foreseen impacts. I believe also that the banking industry is undergoing a major transformation and most of the current jobs will vanish in the next 10 years!”
Source :-The 30 Most Valuable Tech Titans 2018
