The University of Kent are celebrating securing funding to work with Rochester based Fintech company, Portafina Investment Management Ltd, on a two year Knowledge Transfer Partnership project.
The two year project will enable Portafina, a specialist pension advice firm targeting the “advice gap” mass market, to apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to improve workflow and data processing. This will enable Portafina to increase their efficiency, reduce timescales and enable rapid scalability
The partnership are looking forward to recruiting a recently qualified postgraduate, known as the Associate, to deliver the strategic project. The Associate will be based at Portafina’s offices in Rochester and work under the guidance and support of a team of academics from the University’s School of Computing. The academics will be bringing a wealth of expertise in a number of areas including developing algorithms for machine learning and text mining tasks, and techniques in natural language processing.
Jamie Smith-Thompson, MD of Portafina, said:
”We are very excited to be working with the University of Kent on a number of innovative projects that will have a real impact on our efficiency. Our intention is to make it possible to provide much-needed financial advice to a wider mass-market client base by reducing our back-office costs. We are confident these projects will also enable us to increase service quality at the same time.
We can’t wait to get started.”
Carole Barron, Director of Kent Innovation and Enterprise believes that Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are one of a range of ways in which the University’s academic experts link up with national and local businesses to offer practical advice based on their research. Carole said:
“We are delighted to be entering into this exciting collaboration with Portafina in the area of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. We look forward to developing a long relationship with Portafina beyond the two year partnership.”
If you are interested in hearing more or to engage with Kent Innovation and Enterprise as your business & innovation gateway into the University please get in touch with the team
W: www.kent.ac.uk/enterprise
T: 01227 827376
E: enterprise@kent.ac.uk