Development and Commercialisation of AI certification platform for the banking sector

In the wake of COVID-19, businesses of all sizes will need loans to survive, rebuild, and grow their way back to economic success. Banks will be needed to release liquidity into the economy, making the right lending decisions without being biased towards or discriminating against any sections of the economy and our society. At the same time, these same banks are experiencing severe and unexpected loan impairment due to COVID-19, and, as a result, they are taking a cautious approach to credit.

Modern banks already make use of Machine Learning systems to quickly and efficiently evaluate and act on loan applications across their lending operations. However, banks currently rely on existing compliance and governance structures to manage these new decision-making systems, structures which lack the knowledge and expertise to anticipate the possible failings of Machine Learning systems . Banks themselves project that they will become increasingly reliant on the automation and scalability that their ML models can and do provide. This poses a significant risk in ensuring that the banks comply with industry standards and regulations, such as non-discrimination or data privacy.

Through this 9 month industrial research project, we at Mind Foundry Ltd will deliver a tool addressing compliance of ML models for approving loan applications. The solution will consist of a certification system comprising a definition of compliance for ML models in the field of loan approval, methods for exposing when trained ML models are not compliant, and a mechanism for applying these methods to trained models.