Paxus invests in Syntelligence

Press, 12 August 1986, Page 24

Paxus invests in Syntelligence

Paxus Information Services Group, a division of N.Z.I. Corporation, has taken a 10 per cent interest in Syntelligence, a United States artificial intelligence company. Syntelligence specialises in expert system application software for the financial services industry.

Mr Neil Cullimore, general manager of the Paxus Group, says that he considers it a strategic investment in a technology which will play an increasingly important part in the development plans of Paxus over the next few years.

“We believe this association with Syntelligence will provide us with some long-term technology transfer opportunities

as well as the possibility of working with the company to develop international markets for their products,” Mr Cullimore says.

Paxus is currently expanding its operations in the financial services markets, particularly in the United Kingdom and Europe, and predicts a continuation in the strong demand for its products and services from large financial institutions.

Syntelligence was formed in 1983 and to date has received private financing for its development work from a number of United States venture capitalists. Paxus is the first non-United States company to purchase an interest

Syntelligence has developed the only expert sys-

terns that run in standard IBM mainframe environments for evaluation of risks in commercial insurance underwriting and lending applications. These systems capture the knowledge of top industry professionals and provide assistance in the risk evaluation process by making this expertise available in computer form for use by less experienced personnel. Syntelligence began its development work by creating a new computer language called Syntel, with the special ability to allow both Syntelligence and users’ engineers to represent knowledge that simulates experts’ reasoning. This was followed by the development of the “Underwriting Advisor,” an application product de-

signed to provide insurance underwriters’ expert advice on a wide range of commercial insurance risks, and the “Lending Advisor,” a system to assist loan officers in evalu- • ating the credit risks associated with commercial loan applications.

The development process required the cooperative efforts of two separate groups. The first group developed the software necessary to operate an expert system with risk assessment capabilities that would be compatible with IBM’s MVS operating system. This group was composed of six key scientists who had completed pioneering work on expert systems during the past 10 years at SRI International’s Artificial Intelli-

gence Centre in California.

The second group gathered all the necessary facts and decision-making rules needed for an expert system and wrote software to incorporate this knowledge into the finished products. Included in this group were experienced managers from leading financial institutions who were made available to Syntelligence through product development contracts, Syntelligence’s software engineers and industry experts, and independent industry consultants.

Syntelligence began installing early versions of the “Underwriting Advisor” in 1985 and expects to commence installing the “Lending Advisor” later this year. •