Z/Yen has been honoured with the prestigious Department of Trade and Industry Smart Award 2003 for its work on PropheZy, Z/Yen's world-class risk/reward prediction engine. A restricted number of Smart Awards are given to innovative technologies in order to establish their feasibility in wider applications. Z/Yen will use the £45,000 proceeds from the Smart Award for further research and development of real-time visualization, primarily of financial markets, using PropheZy. The research will further extend Z/Yen's earlier 1996 Foresight Challenge award-winning, "alpha science" work on risk visualization from the Financial £aboratory that made waves from the FT to Wired magazine.

PropheZy is a suite of statistical software that classifies, models and predicts events. Z/Yen uses PropheZy to help organisations prosper by making better choices. PropheZy is based upon sophisticated statistical techniques that classify and model historic multivariate data in order to make predictions on new data. Clients use PropheZy to respond dynamically to favourable or adverse patterns or anomalies in order to get a real-time "detailed grip on the big picture".

PropheZy is proving especially effective in the world of finance, for example classifying trading patterns, reducing failure rates, fraud detection, investment spotting or predicting operational failure in trials at several investment banks. PropheZy has also been effective in: ¨ customer intelligence, e.g. predicting consumer profitability or television viewers; ¨ information & communications technology, e.g. network routing and workflow; ¨ management information, e.g. finding anomalies or setting performance targets.

Michael Mainelli, Z/Yen's CEO, says, "we are absolutely delighted that the DTI has chosen to make this award for PropheZy. While we never guessed this would happen to us, PropheZy of course would have predicted it."

Z/Yen is thrilled with winning this SMART Award at the end of a fascinating year and predicts a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to come for all Z/Yen's friends in the press.