Welcome to the Spectator's Economic Innovator of the Year Awards for 2022.

I'm Martin van der Weir, business editor of The Spectator, and it's my pleasure for this podcast to introduce this year's regional finalists for the awards from Scotland

and Northern Ireland. We invited four finalists from those regions to lunch with us in Edinburgh

at a very fine restaurant called Dome in George Street, where they pitched their businesses to our

distinguished panel of judges. So we'll be hearing from those four businesses. From Northern Ireland,

we met Cardinal Analytics, which is a fintech big data business, MacRieber in road surfacing, Roslin Technologies in laboratory

made cultured meat and synaptech in manufacture of fault sensors for power networks.

After each of them gives us a very brief pitch, you'll be hearing from our

judges today, who are Meren Somerset Webb, editor-in-chief of Moneyweek magazine and Financial

Times columnist, Irene McAlees of C-Sense, the Northern Ireland Company, which was one of the earliest

winners of our awards, and representing our sponsor InvestTech today, our friends Michelle White

and Arlene Ewing. So you'll hear their views on each of the pitches. So let's hear first from

Cardinal Analytics. I guess Cardinal Analytics really very dry and quite boring to most people,

but it's quite necessary. And it's quantitative finance, specifically how to predict

when companies go bankrupt.

The 2007-8 crisis really showed that there's a lot of investors out there who are meant

to be quite savvy, quite good, and they didn't really see a lot of this coming.

People see this as a very boring subject, very esoteric,

and they don't really consider thinking about it and generating new models and trying to

assist in predicting default risk. So that's really what Cardinal exists to do, to try to predict

default risk. His spokesman was Mark Fletcher.

So this is FinTech and its big data statistical analysis.

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