Laura Hutton, Chief Customer Advocate, Quantexa
Today we're meeting Laura Hutton, Chief Customer Advocate at Quantexa. They specialise in AI, data and analytics software pioneering Decision Intelligence to empower organizations to make trusted operational decisions.
Over to you Laura - my questions are in bold:
Who are you and what's your background?
I'm Laura Hutton, and I'm one of the six co-founders and the Chief Customer Advocate of global AI, data and analytics software company Quantexa. Our mission at Quantexa is to use innovative technology to solve real-world problems and to empower organizations to make better, more trusted decisions. We help large institutions, such as HSBC and BNY Mellon to make the most of their data, supporting more effective, accurate and efficient decision making whether that be to protect their business, optimize it or grow it.
Prior to my role at Quantexa, I helped organizations to fight financial crime and fraud for over a decade. Most notably, I developed and took to market a new approach to detecting rogue trading in the wake of the 2008 Jerome Kerviel scandal.
Originally from Belfast, I have always had a love for mathematics and went on to study for a Master of Mathematics at Durham University. I first found my passion for innovation and technology solutions as a graduate. I learnt to code and very quickly fell in love with data and AI.
At Quantexa, we've been on quite the journey. We've grown the business from just six founders to 750+ employees globally. We've gone from opening offices in tech hubs like Malaga Tech Park, where we will create more than 120 jobs in the next three years, to setting up our homegrown £85m London AI Innovation Centre, which aims to support the UK Government's plan to make the UK an AI hub.
During this time, I have also had two children, now aged 7 and 4. And when I'm not running around after the kids (you know how it is!), I like to spend my time on the hockey field or running with friends.
What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
As Chief Customer Advocate, I help our clients in bridging the gap between their business pain points and our platforms capabilities best suited to them. In an uncertain world, decisions need to be made based on trusted data. Building on my industry experience, I currently lead Quantexa's Solution Engineering, Customer Success, Community, and Client/Partner Academy teams.
Our platform offers Decision Intelligence solutions for our customers biggest data challenges. Decision Intelligence is what enables private sector and public sector organizations to go from 'guesswork' recommendations to making decisions that are informed and confident. Quantexa is part of a $500bn Decision Intelligence category, and the number of industries we can help transform is quickly expanding – it's really exciting! In my role, in which I'm laser focused on the customer, I work to ensure clients leverage our platform to deliver maximum value for their business. My team supports the sales cycle as well as post-sale, to ensure that the full potential is not just understood but fully realised. We often find that Chief Data Officers, Chief Technology Officers and Chief Architects have the odds stacked against them as people trying to solve these data problems. They need to execute results quickly, so part of my team's role is showing we are fully attuned to the pressures they are up against.
From helping organizations stop illicit the activity of financial crime to creating our recent groundbreaking global AI hub for health and social hub care in Liverpool, my role is about supporting these different communities. We aren't just creating and developing our tech for fun- we are impacting society and driving transformational change through cutting edge solutions at some of the largest organizations on the planet.
I would like to caveat however, that there are many different dimensions to my role. My team takes customers on the journey of discovery and, ultimately then down a successful pathway of execution. Data and AI initiatives can easily fall into the 'too hard' bracket – I am there to give them confidence and to support them as they take the relevant steps so that the full potential of our technology and indeed their data, can be realised. In this way, our customers can truly make transformational impact.
As a leader, I am passionate about developing and growing our team, supporting our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and being a role model for women in tech. I love my job and the impact our company is making. We help our clients be more efficient, to grow but also to protect using data for good. I am so proud of the work we do to help organizations in banking, insurance, telecoms, government, and more build a trusted data foundation to enable effective decisions that help them operate efficiently, plan, and grow. We help these customers quickly ingest data at scale to unify billions of data points across internal and external data sources to provide a single, contextualized view. We are passionate about bringing the next generation on this journey too. This is why I lead with Quantexa's four core values in mind to ensure we are all on the same mission– DATA: Determination, Ambition, Teamwork, Accountability.
Can you give us an overview of your business?
Quantexa uses the latest advancements in big data and AI to uncover hidden risk and new opportunities by providing a contextual, connected view of internal and external data in a single place. We solve major challenges across data management, KYC, customer intelligence, financial crime, risk, fraud, and security, throughout the customer lifecycle.
We help global household names like BNY Mellon, HSBC, and Standard Chartered, as well as public sector bodies such as the UK's Cabinet Office make better decisions based on their data. For example, HSBC uses our software to process about 60 billion records a day, to prevent money laundering and fraud. The Public Sector Fraud Authority (PFSA), which was set up last year to help public bodies tackle fraud against the public purse, also works with Quantexa to find and prevent more fraud across the public sector. The £4 million contract is part of a wider investment across government to take the fight to those committing fraud against the taxpayer – rooting out fraud and using modern tools and techniques to stop it before it happens.
Quantexa helps customers establish a culture of confident decision-making at strategic, operational, and tactical levels to mitigate risk and seize opportunities on their path to building efficient and resilient organizations.
Tell us how you are funded?
Our investment round in April 2023 was led by GIC, with a valuation of $1.8BN and accelerated the execution of our growth strategy within the *$500BN DI category. Additionally, in July 2023, we announced we would invest heavily in the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry over the next three years to help clients advance the use of AI to protect, optimize, and grow their organizations.
These two investments will see Quantexa scale to meet demand in over 70 countries. We currently offer solutions to the banking, insurance, CSP, technology, and governmental industries and sectors offering huge potential to grow our customer base. Currently, over 25% of the world's 50 largest banks use our Decision Intelligence Platform to build a trusted data foundation and realize the benefits of operationalizing AI.
Additionally, this year, a strategic partnership with Microsoft made our Decision Intelligence Platform immediately available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace for financial services organizations and government agencies to benefit from.
As a company, our growth has been fast and sustainable. My role is to help balance that growth to learn, develop, and walk through doors we once thought would take far longer to open.
What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?
I have known most of the other co-founders since I was just a graduate. Having worked alongside one another for many years, there is inherent trust between us. We have complementary skills, but we are all driving towards the same vision and outlook to bring innovation and confidence in decision-making to every industry in the world by driving the switch to contextual data.
In late 2015, we saw the white space in the industry to give organizations an open, transparent and scalable solution leveraging innovative technology. We could support them to be self-sufficient solution so that they could get the most value out of their own data and AI initiatives at an acceptable price point. Many people have asked recently about our advancements in AI. My answer is that AI excellence is inherent to what we have been researching and developing since day one. It's in our DNA.
Of course, we benefited from the market conditions. We learned to apply a much broader approach in banking and other industries. We are using data and AI to drive enterprise-wide augmented and automated decisioning to better serve customers whilst adding towards profitability This external environment combined with our natural ambition for success, group experience meant the moment was right to set up shop.
Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?
Our platform prioritizes establishing a solid, trusted data foundation, to empower organizations to make data driven decisions. This means we're looking to work with customers spanning a wide range of industries, tackling a wide range of data problems.
And we're always looking for new ways to innovate to keep up with the complex challenges we're seeing our customers tackling. For example, we recently launched Q Assist, our Generative AI technology suite. Q Assist Generative AI Technology Suite targets organizations like financial institutions, as evidenced by early adopters HSBC and BNY Mellon. These organizations are looking to leverage Q Assist for tasks such as anti-money laundering investigations and sales strategy improvements. The suite will also be useful for any organization struggling with large and disparate data sets, as Q Assist Copilot allows users to query this type of data and automate tasks associated with it.
Our software is licensed on a subscription basis.
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
We are passionate as a company about supporting those in education and in their early career to be inspired for their next role in tech. As a female leader, I feel I have a huge responsibility to encourage more women to pursue careers in the field.
This is because it's vital to have a diverse team at the table when developing any type of technology. As a leader in the technology space, I strongly understand the problem and solution relationship and deeply seek to analyze who will be using and benefiting from the end model.
In my experience, having a diverse team can really help understand the end-user in different ways. This means the tech you build is substantially more successful. It goes back to the saying, "if you build it, they will come".
What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?
All financial services firms are attempting to use AI. However, they are having to contend with an overwhelming volume of data, which has in the past been seen as a barrier to success rather than something that can support it. In fact, our research found that 90% of data deemed potentially useful by enterprises is not being analyzed today. At Quantexa, we help organizations help unlock value by bringing data together from any source, revealing relationships and insights
The solution is not straight forward – scale, cost, complexity, data quality, governance and usability. Common challenges which compound to create a lack of trust in the data being used to support strategic and operational decision making.
The key is to invest in getting your data right in the first place. AI is only as good as the data that feeds its' algorithms. Using techniques such as entity resolution and network analytics, organizations can unify all the available internal and external data. In doing so, you create an enriched contextual view of who you are doing business with throughout their lifecycle with you. This builds a trusted data foundation that all areas of the bank can leverage, to support AI initiatives and decision intelligence gaps.
Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?
- Financial Times
- The Banker
- Sifted
What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?
It's not new but I love using ChatGPT to create bedtime stories for my kids! The kids can name the characters, location – anything they want really!
Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
Data, AI and decision intelligence presents a transformative opportunity for the fintech sector. Building a solid data foundation is the cornerstone of success in this new era. By unifying and cleaning data, fintech's can turn information into insights, driving innovation and ensuring AI is used responsibly. This foundation will define the next decade of fintech leadership, separating the blue chips from the also-rans. It's a future built on trust, accuracy, and the responsible application of powerful technologies.
Thank you very much, Laura!
Read more about Laura on LinkedIn and find out more about Quantexa at www.quantexa.com.