eyeDES: From detecting cancer to spotting market abuse

How do you switch careers from fighting cancer through advanced medical diagnostics to combating fraud in financial services?

Well, the obvious route is via a postgraduate degree in computer science, a doctorate in applied physics and years working in artificial intelligence.

In 2014, Cristina Soviany founded Features Analytics, based in Brussels, where she transposed principles coming from her earlier work in cancer tissue characterization with ultrasound imaging to create eyeDES – a new machine learning and artificial intelligence platform to detect financial market abuse.

Having first worked on payments, the company is now concentrating on the capital markets, gaining increasing momentum with global investment banks and exchanges.

“I had been used to analyzing huge volumes of data and identifying with heightened specificity the presence of any abnormal tissue that could be malign while seeking to avoid false positives and indeed false negatives,” Soviany recalls. “I had the idea to apply the same principles to financial fraud, where data is everything but is also constantly evolving. And we began to develop software tailored to the payments industry.”

Then in 2016 one of the banks it had been dealing with challenged the company to help it detect manipulation in the foreign exchange market.