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Finovate is the world’s leading conference series for fintech and financial services innovation — bringing together senior leaders from global banks, asset managers, insurers, and financial technology companies to examine the technologies reshaping how financial institutions operate. Being featured at Finovate is a meaningful signal: it means the technology being discussed is considered relevant by the practitioners who use it, not just the vendors who build it.
In this interview recorded at Finovate, Martin Saunders, Senior Solution Consultant at Sinequa, explains how leading financial institutions are using Sinequa’s AI-powered cognitive search platform to solve the core information challenge that defines modern banking: vast, disconnected data across dozens of systems, with no unified, intelligent way to find what matters — fast enough to act on it.
Leading financial institutions depend on technology to mine valuable data from a multitude of complex sources, enrich it, and connect it across topical lines so key stakeholders can obtain relevant information — creating opportunities to increase revenue and reduce risk. Finovate At the same time, regulatory pressure from frameworks including MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, GDPR, and evolving global compliance standards demands that organisations not only access this data efficiently, but govern and audit it with precision.
The result is a dual challenge: financial professionals need faster, smarter access to information to make better decisions — while compliance and risk functions need comprehensive, traceable visibility across the same data to meet regulatory obligations. Standard enterprise search addresses neither requirement adequately.
The interview addresses how Sinequa’s cognitive search platform is deployed across four core financial services workflows:
Know Your Customer (KYC) and Client Intelligence. Sinequa helps financial institutions find patterns and relationships among disparate data from different silos to deliver an advanced KYC approach — with contextual insights from a timeline of important events including M&A activity, fundraising, credits, and litigation. Finovate Rather than manually assembling client profiles from multiple systems, relationship managers and compliance teams get a unified, intelligent view of every client and counterparty, built from all available internal and external data simultaneously.
360° Investment and Portfolio Views. Sinequa surfaces topically relevant information from disparate sources in a unified view — for example, a 360° view of a bond fund that brings together information from different business applications, previous analysis, broker commentary, email, news sites, and more. Finovate Analysts and portfolio managers can search across all relevant content from a single interface, with results ranked by semantic relevance rather than keyword frequency.
Regulatory Compliance and MiFID II. Compliance and legal teams use Sinequa to search across regulatory filings, internal policies, client communications, and external regulatory guidance simultaneously — with entity recognition ensuring that searches for a regulation, counterparty, or instrument surface all relevant documentation regardless of how it is referenced across systems. This is particularly critical for MiFID II best execution obligations, GDPR data subject access requests, and Dodd-Frank reporting requirements.
Research and Decision Support. Investment research teams use Sinequa to monitor and search across news, earnings transcripts, analyst reports, market data feeds, and internal research archives from one interface — surfacing emerging signals, competitive intelligence, and thematic connections that would require hours of manual cross-referencing to assemble without AI-powered search.
The use cases Martin Saunders describes at Finovate — KYC intelligence, 360° client views, compliance monitoring, and investment research — represent the first generation of what is now becoming a much broader AI transformation in financial services.
Leading banks and asset managers are extending their cognitive search foundation into agentic AI: systems capable of autonomously monitoring regulatory developments and alerting compliance teams to relevant changes, proactively surfacing client intelligence ahead of relationship reviews, generating draft investment memoranda by synthesising research across internal and external sources, and flagging anomalies in trading data by connecting patterns across previously disconnected systems.
These agentic capabilities are only trustworthy in a regulated environment when the underlying knowledge retrieval infrastructure is complete, accurate, and permission-aware — which is precisely what Sinequa’s cognitive search platform provides. In an industry where the cost of missing a regulatory signal, misclassifying a client risk, or acting on incomplete investment intelligence is measured in fines, reputation, and revenue, the quality of the information layer is not a technology detail. It is a governance imperative.
About Finovate
Finovate — part of the Informa Connect portfolio — has been tracking fintech and banking innovation since 1994, making it the longest-running and most widely attended conference series in the financial technology sector. Finovate’s audience includes senior decision-makers from global financial institutions, regulators, and technology leaders actively evaluating solutions for enterprise deployment. Sinequa’s presence at Finovate reflects its positioning as a technology platform of genuine relevance to the operational challenges facing the global financial services industry.
Finovate is the world’s leading conference series for fintech and financial services innovation, tracking banking and financial technology developments since 1994. Run by Informa Connect, Finovate brings together senior leaders from global banks, asset managers, insurers, regulators, and technology companies across its flagship events including FinovateEurope, FinovateSpring, and FinovateFall. Being selected to present or be featured at Finovate signals that a technology is considered genuinely relevant by senior financial services practitioners — not just by vendors. Sinequa’s presence at Finovate reflects its status as a cognitive search platform actively deployed by major financial institutions.
Banks use AI-powered cognitive search platforms like Sinequa to build comprehensive, dynamically updated profiles of clients and counterparties by connecting all available internal and external data simultaneously — including transaction histories, communications, news, litigation records, M&A activity, and regulatory filings. Rather than manually searching multiple systems, KYC analysts get a unified intelligence view with contextual relationships surfaced automatically. This dramatically reduces the time required to complete KYC reviews, improves the accuracy of risk assessments, and creates a searchable, auditable record of all information considered in the assessment.
A 360° client view is a unified, comprehensive representation of a client relationship that draws together all relevant internal data (account records, transaction history, CRM notes, previous research, communications) and external data (news, market events, regulatory filings, social signals) into a single, searchable interface. Cognitive search enables this by connecting all data sources — regardless of format, language, or system — through NLP and semantic analysis, then presenting relationship managers and analysts with a dynamically assembled view of everything relevant to a client in real time, rather than requiring manual aggregation across dozens of applications.
MiFID II creates extensive documentation, best execution, and client communication obligations that require financial firms to capture, store, and rapidly retrieve large volumes of structured and unstructured data across trading, communications, and client interaction records. Sinequa enables compliance teams to search across all of this data simultaneously from a single interface — finding relevant records for regulatory reporting, responding to regulatory enquiries, monitoring communications for compliance, and auditing trading activity — without navigating multiple disconnected systems. The platform’s ability to understand regulatory terminology and entity relationships means searches return all relevant records regardless of how they are described across different systems.
Sinequa’s financial services customers include major European and global banks, insurance companies, and asset management firms. Named customers in the financial services sector include Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Groupama, and DZ Bank, among others. These organisations use Sinequa to power use cases including client intelligence, investment research, compliance monitoring, regulatory reporting, and cross-departmental knowledge management.
Standard enterprise search matches keywords to documents — it can tell you a document contains a term but cannot understand what the document means, who the entities in it are, or how it relates to other documents. Cognitive search uses NLP, semantic analysis, and machine learning to understand meaning, extract entities (companies, instruments, people, regulations), and surface relationships across all connected data. For financial services, this distinction is operationally critical: a search for a company should surface all related instruments, counterparties, regulatory filings, and news events — not just documents that happen to contain the company name. Cognitive search makes this possible across all data sources simultaneously.
