Irish fintech Fexco has won this year’s Irish Times Innovation of the Year award for its new sustainability technology Pace, a bespoke digital platform for aviation emissions analysis.
The Kerry-based financial services company may be best known for its currency exchange business but over the last 40 years it has diversified with innovations in other sectors.
The platform is aimed at businesses that finance the aviation sector, as well as companies that might have a lot of corporate overseas travel.
The airline industry is one of many attempting to meet net-zero carbon emissions. However, up to now, there have been “no standardised, reliable, robust data analytics available to enable the sector to start measuring and moving towards meeting these targets”, says Cathal Foley, chief executive of Pace.
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“This is where Pace fits in. It delivers industry-leading real-time emission data, supporting the measurement and management of aviation’s 2050 net-zero goal.”
Pace (Platform for Analysing Carbon Emissions) uses publicly available data combined with AI and machine learning to track aircraft, assess their emissions and inform future decision-making. The system can pinpoint the data by airline, aircraft, flight and even by individual seat.
“Before Pace, the only way to get the data was by asking individual operators for it, which was slow, time-consuming and inconsistent. With Pace, an investor can see at a glance which assets are performing well in an emissions context and which ones are not,” says Foley.
Pace has launched Pace BlueSkies and Pace Airports to target two different markets. Pace BlueSkies is geared towards corporate customers, such as investment companies, looking for ways to lower their carbon output in aviation. Pace Airports focuses on flight movements and allows airports to look at their growth and carbon emissions data separately, avoiding the risk of inaccurate data results.
Pace also won the top award in the Sustainability category, sponsored by Skillnet Ireland.
Other winners included Cork-based CergenX, in the Life Sciences & Healthcare category, sponsored by Research Ireland. CergenX has developed a new, easy-to-use brain-monitoring technology called Wave, which helps identify newborns in need of extra support or treatment, with the aim of reducing the impact of brain injury on their lives. For some babies, complications can lead to brain injury, hard-to-detect seizures and even problems in later life.
Wave is non-intrusive; it involves placing sensors on the baby’s head and monitoring EEG signals for 10 minutes. The data wings its way to the cloud, where it is analysed by CergenX’s AI, and within seconds the results are back, clearly highlighting whether the results showed any abnormal findings, so medical teams can make important decisions quickly.
The Wave technology emerged from research carried out at the Infant centre at University College Cork.
Life-saving innovations also won out in the New Frontiers category, sponsored by the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, with Mayo’s Eco Powered Cabinets (EPC) taking top prize.
Founded by Darren Forde, it provides solar-powered cabinets for storing medicine in remote locations such as beaches or mountains.
The cabinets are made with lifetime-grade steel to withstand all weather conditions and they “never ever rust”, says Forde. For him, safely storing crucial medications such as aspirin and EpiPens in hard-to-reach places was a key motivator in creating the cabinets, whose separate compartments keep medicines at either high or low temperatures. Heart defibrillators, for example, are stored in the higher-temperature compartment, whereas aspirin, which needs to be kept at below 25 degrees, goes in the cooler compartment.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) has come on board with Eco Powered Cabinets’ innovation, so if a person calls the emergency services from a remote location they can be directed to the nearest cabinet and given the necessary codes to unlock it. Cabinets are also being installed in coastal and river locations in Ireland, where they are fitted with relevant water safety gear, along with the medical equipment, while two cabinets have recently been placed in remote locations in Australia.
The winner of the IT & Fintech category, sponsored by Mason Hayes & Curran, was Skippio. The company’s app aims to keep the user out of the queues for food and drinks at large events, says chief executive Daniel Coen. It is a fan-experience app that allows users to order and pay for food and beverages from anywhere in a venue without joining the queue. The company’s goal is to enhance the overall fan experience for people at the event and for organisers.
Research has shown that about 47 per cent of people who go to events will not bother joining a bar queue, while 45 per cent of customers will leave a queue due to long waiting times. Skippio partnering with stadiums means users don’t have to download and log in to multiple apps when they visit different venues, says Coen, who has his sights set on venues in the UK and further afield.
Already the company has developed partnerships with Leopardstown Racecourse, Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Galway International Arts Festival.
In the Design & Manufacturing category, sponsored by Sisk Group, engineering start-up Better Futures picked up the award for its AI tools that seek to help engineers dramatically cut down their paperwork.
Better Futures’ engineering verification assistant, or EVA, is designed to help engineers instantly adopt generative AI tools to do the heavy lifting in administration tasks, freeing them up for more creative pursuits.
“Engineers only spend about 20 per cent of their time doing engineering and truly innovating,” says Better Futures founder and CEO Anthony McLoughlin. “AI is arguably the greatest tool at their disposal to improve this but figures from the US show that only 4 per cent have adopted it.”
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