AI for All: Democratizing Data Science for Financial Inclusion

AI for All: Democratizing Data Science for Financial Inclusion
Jeremy Engelbrecht, Lalit Mohan, Ed Cable

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020

In this session members of the community working group leading artificial intelligence and machine learning will outline the vision and roadmap for leveraging Apache Fineract to democratize data science for financial inclusion. They’ll share case studies highlighting how members of the community are currently pioneering tools for explainable decision making, enhance customer experience, and micro-analytics. The roadmap will lay out how to evolve the Apache Fineract platform to support credit scoring and origination tools, targeted segmentation and predictive product insights, KYC, AML, and accelerated onboarding, fraud detection, chatbots with natural and regional language support, customer churn prediction, and more.

Jeremy Engelbrecht:
Jeremy has 20 years experience in the design of software systems from end to end (SDLC). He has worked for two banks in Southern Africa, First National Bank and Standard bank and also worked for a JSE listed insurance company, Clientele. He was the Solutions Architect for an award-winning European fintech company called Mybucks. He was selected to be the CTO to start the first digital bank in Saudi Arabia. He has co-founded LNDR which is a fintech company that has started the first digital bank in Swaziland and is the chosen fintech company of choice for a large bank in south africa. He is currently completing his MSc in advanced computer science at the University of Liverpool, majoring in Artificial Intelligence with a dissertation based on proving a hypothesis to use DBN(Deep Belief Networks) to do credit scoring using large unstructured datasets.

Lalit Mohan:
Lalit is pursuing his PhD in Computer Science & Engineering at IIIT Hyderabad in the area of Information Retrieval, Software Engineering, ML and NLP. Lalit has been a GSOC mentor at Mifos/Fineract for the last 2 years. Lalit has 23+ Years of IT experience at Infosys, Wells Fargo, IDRBT (India’s central bank - Reserve Bank of India - Technology research institute). He has published papers on Credit risk evaluation using ML Models, Digital Banking, FAQs on Cloud Computing for Banks, API Banking, Open source for Banks and other articles. He is also a member of Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN). Some of the key projects executed include a) Treasury Management for World Bank b) Establishment of Indian Banking Community Cloud c) Deployment of Payment Systems in a SaaS model to reduce the capital expenses for cooperative Banks.

Ed Cable:
Ed has been a part of the Mifos project since 2007 in its early days at Grameen Foundation. He oversaw the open source community, connecting its members worldwide with the tools, support, and engagement needed to build and use Mifos. Leading the growth of this burgeoning community, he saw the dedication and persistence of its members and decided to found COSM (now the Mifos Initiative) to unite their efforts and help them collectively fulfill the vision Grameen Foundation set out to achieve. Prior to this, he graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he led marketing for the nation’s largest student-run credit union and discovered his passion for technology-driven international development in their budding social entrepreneurship program. When he’s not watching over the Mifos community, he’s tending to another community of sorts, his mini-farmhouse of animals – chickens, bunnies, dogs, goats, cats, birds, and fish.