Julius Technologies won judges over with its big data analytics tool in this year’s Bank Automation Ignite DEMOvation challenge today. Enteruptors, an intelligent automation platform for small banks, came in second place in the competition.

The Middletown, Del.-based Julius Technologies uses a proprietary framework that automates the building and support of a data architecture for a variety of use cases, including machine learning models, said co-founder and Chief Executive James Lee.

“The inconvenient truth about building data and analytics is that finding an AI model or algorithm isn’t the hard part,” Lee said. “It’s really the infrastructure you need to support that tech. That complex plumbing makes up 90% of the time and costs, and it’s what financial companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on to fix and maintain.”

Data architecture is also the reason nine out of 10 machine learning models fail to make it into production, Lee added, calling it “simply the most painful and most expensive problem facing enterprise it today.”

That resonated with the three judges, who said they were impressed by the demo.

“It is addressing problems we talk about on a daily basis, but there are a lot of things on my near horizon that I would look,” said event judge Mike McCrary, vice president of Lincoln Savings Bank. He was joined in judging by Benjamin Maxim, assistant vice president of digital strategy and innovation at MSU Federal Credit Union and Ben Schack, head of U.S. digital partnerships for BMO Financial Group.

Lee demonstrated using the tool to handle a machine learning platform for credit approval requests. With its proprietary language, Rules, the solution built the entire system in 32 lines of code. The build took a few days versus a team spending thousands of hours to custom build, Lee said.

The tool also can handle data sorting, cleansing and integration, and incorporates a visualization tool so users can view the process at the individual computer level. It also includes multiple reports to monitor the performance of a model.

For winning the event, Julius Technologies receives a Bank Automation News advertising package.

Other competitors in this year’s DEMOvation included:

• Upswot, a startup that provides business insights powered with standardized data from 120 API-enabled apps used by small and medium sized businesses. Upswot recently entered a co-sell agreement with Microsoft.
• Lendsmart, which automates and digitalizes the mortgage process.
• Romulus, which automates document-heavy operations in financial services.

Bank Automation Risk Summit, on June 15-16, is an all-new event that will explore automation in regulatory compliance and risk management for financial institutions. At the virtual event, attendees will gain valuable intelligence on new practices, methods, processes, tools, and data for improved risk management planning and performance to drive better results and fewer risk failures. Learn more and register at www.bankautomationrisk.com.