Periodic Reporting for period 2 - INFINITECH (Tailored IoT & BigData Sandboxes and Testbeds for Smart, Autonomous and Personalized Services in the European Finance and Insurance Services Ecosystem) Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2022-03-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project INFINITECH is a joint effort of Europe’s leaders in IT and Finance/Insurance sectors towards providing the technological capabilities, the experimentation facilities (testbeds & sandboxes) and the business models needed to enable European financial organizations, insurance enterprises and FinTech/InsuranceTech innovators to fully leverage the benefits of BigData, IoT and AI technologies. The latter benefits include a shift towards autonomous (i.e. automated and intelligent) processes, that are dynamically adaptable and personalized to end-users’ needs, while being compliant to the sector’s complex regulatory environment. INFINTECH works towards delivering disruptive innovations in four complementary forefronts/levels: Innovative Technological Building Blocks for BigData, IoT and AI in Finance and Insurance, including infrastructures, components and toolkits for seamless data access and querying across multiple fragmented data sources, technologies for cost-effective real-time analytics, advanced analytics algorithms (including AI), technologies for data governance and regulatory compliance, technologies for trustful and secure data sharing over blockchain infrastructures, as well as handling of semantic data interoperability across stakeholders of the financial/insurance supply chain. INFINITECH will also provide a Reference Architecture (RA) for BigData, IoT and AI applications in the financial sector, which will serve as a blueprint for integrating, deploying and operating BigData and IoT infrastuctures, including infrastructures that will leverage the above-listed building blocks. The RA will provide the means for integrating and deploying applications that take advantage of leading edge technologies, including predictive analytics, different instances of AI (e.g. DL, chatbots), blockchains and more. Several Large-Scale Innovative Pilots in Finance and Insurance, which will leverage both the technological developments of the project (including the INFINITECH RA) and the testbeds/sandboxes in order to deploy and validate novel use cases in real-life environments based on realistic datasets i.e. either real anonymized datasets or synthetic datasets with pragmatic statistical properties. The pilots will span a wide array of areas covering the most prominent processes of the financial and insurance sectors, including KYC and customer centric analytics, fraud detection and financial crime, credit risk assessment, risk assessment for capital management, personalized portfolio management, risk assessment in investment banking, personalized usage-based insurance, insurance products recommendations and more. The pilots demonnstrates the added-value of the project’s technologies and testbeds, while at the same time showcasing the project’s disruptive impact on Europe’s financial and insurance sectors . Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far -Delivery and validation of first version of a Reference Architecture for BigData/IoT/AI applications in the financial and insurance sectors (INFINITECH-RA)-Blueprint for the rapid and cost-effective solutions development and deployment-Specification of a set of building blocks that can support advanced BigData, AI and IoT applications-Delivery of the INFINITECH datastore-Unified access over SQL and NoSQL databases ,-INFINITECH Semantic Interoperability Framework; -Finance–related Ontologies Online tool and creation of INFINITECH Core Ontology; Online Tools for Data annotation and Semantic Interoperability; Semantic Stream Analyzer Middleware/Engine (SeSA-me) for stream processing-Design and implementation of the permissioned blockchain network for INFINITECH; Blockchain infrastructure deployment for INFINITECH’s Applications-Implementation and delivery of the declarative framework for real-time analytics, introducing online aggregates-Provision of more than 10 ML/DL techniques for digital finance problems.-Incorporation of Psychometric and BetaRecys ML/DL engines; Integration of 2 machine learning data analytic platforms: Framework for definition and deployment of ML-based microservices-Preliminary definition of tools and techniques that have been leveraged to implement the testbeds, sandboxes and management of datasets concepts within the project, (i.e. the enabling baseline of the overall TO-BE situation for the INFINITECH project)-Blueprint guidelines for the “INFINITECH way” deployments of project pilots testbeds, sandboxes, management of datasets and technologies, together with a concrete implementation of the guidelines in an actual blueprint infrastructure-Setup of a new data-center infrastructure; Initial design of a self-certification scheme and associated methodology-Applications deployed using INFINITECH recipes and building blocks; -Each partner has formulated its own business plan; Each pilot has defined its own business scenario-Collection of various assets and ingestion in the market platform to populate it with content including representative examples of algorithms / models and INFINITECH components-Scoping of VDIH and definition of the services to be offered Dissemination achievments: 8 Publications have been published in different specialized magazines (e.g. Springer, etc.); Approval of INFINITECH Open Access Book by Springer Nature – Preparation of the Book (Expected Publication Date: 4th Quarter 2021); 1 hackathon (organization on going, expected for 4th Quarter 2021);Estimation of INFINITECH Community Size (all channels) around 350 people (average of all channels). LinkedIn: 152/ Twitter: 203 followers/NL: 590Communication achievements:Publication of 13 newsletters; 5 videos have been recorded; 45 Blog Posts; Organization of 10 Workshops; Participation in 12 Workshops/Conferences Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) INFINITECH Project aims to increase the innovation and productivity in the Finance and Insurance sectors in different business cases including:o KYC/KYB/Onboarding, o Usage-Based Insurance, o Consent Management, o High Frequency Trading, o Asset Management, o Personalized Investments, o Business Finance Management, o Anti-Money Laundering, o Fraud Detection Moreover, it will increase the market share of Big Data technology providers targeting primarily the Large-Scale Pilot Action including the blockchain demonstrators:• Integration of HPC/BD/ Cloud/IoT technologies in the finance sector, resulting into integrated value chains and efficient business processes of the participating organizations, including:o 10+ Variants/Instantiations of the INFINITECH-RA validatedo Seven testbeds available as of April 2021• Expanded the use and facilitated the access to advanced HPC, big data and cloud infrastructures stimulating the emergence of the data economy in Europe, including:o >40 of datasets in use in the pilotso >8 Validated and Replicable Business Models In areas like insurance, Wealth management, risk assessment, KYC/KYBStimulation of public target investments in HPC and Big Data technologies from industry, Member States and Associated Countries, and other sources, as referred to in the contractual arrangements of the HPC and/or the Big Data Value Public Private Partnerships, including:o 25 FinTech firms and innovators engaging in the project’s ecosystem and VDIH (from EU-28 countries)o 18 New innovative applications leveraging the project’s technologies and/or experimental infrastructureso 5 Liaisons with Innovation funds in Member Stateso 2 Liaisons and collaboration with EU-wide PPP initiatives Infinitech CheatSheet
