Friday, 26 April 2024
MAS announces fairness metrics to aid responsible AI adoption in financial services
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that the first phase of the Veritas initiative, a framework for financial institutions to promote the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence and data analytics (AIDA), will commence with the development of fairness metrics in credit risk scoring and customer marketing.
The metrics will help financial institutions (FIs) validate the fairness of their AIDA solutions in two use cases. More use cases will be identified in subsequent phases of the initiative.
Credit risk scoring to assess the credit worthiness of borrowers is a critical function of the financial services industry and impacts most customers of financial institutions. Given the large amount of customer data to analyse, FIs are increasingly employing AI tools for this purpose. It is crucial that AI-driven decisions do not systematically disadvantage any particular individuals or groups when determining the credit risk scoring.
Customer marketing is another area with significant potential for AI adoption. As marketing processes become increasingly digitalised and automated, there is an increasing scope to use AI tools to analyse customer data and match products or services to customers. Hence, it is important that such AI solutions recommend the right product to the right customer at the right time.
Two core teams within the Veritas consortium will be taking on the development of the fairness metrics:
- UOB and Element AI will develop the metrics on credit risk scoring
- HSBC, IAG Firemark Labs and Gradient Institute will develop the metrics on customer marketing
The consortium will publish a white paper documenting the metrics and release an open-source code to enable FIs to adopt the fairness metrics in these two areas by the end of 2020. Financial institutions can integrate the open-source code into their own IT environment to validate the fairness of their AI solutions. The open-source code will also be deployed as a service on the APIX platform. This will allow FIs and fintechs to have access to the service and technology providers on the platform who are able to validate their AI solutions.
Since the announcement of the project in November 2019, eight new members have joined the Veritas consortium. This brings the current membership to 25 members.
MAS’ chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty said, “The responsible use of AI is a prerequisite for the greater adoption of AI in the financial sector. Veritas is the first industrywide collaboration to provide a mathematical way to validate AIDA solutions against the principles of fairness, ethics, accountability and transparency. We hope Veritas will speed up the adoption of AI in financial services in the right direction.”
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
