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Open Webinar - Making AI-based Finance Work for Women
05 May 2021
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A discussion with Women's World Banking and Friends.
In 2020, Women’s World Banking began a journey to understand algorithmic bias as it relates to women’s financial inclusion. This topic is especially important as we speed into a digital finance future, accelerated in great measure by Covid-19. However, women are less likely to own a phone especially a smartphone, and less likely to access the internet. Moreover, there are certainly no guarantees that digital credit and AI-based underwriting will take into account women’s digital constraints as well as similar limiting conditions.
In this session, you will hear from executives at Women's World Banking, Tyme, Kaleidofin and Africa Fintech Foundry, about the risks of algorithm-based underwriting to women customers – fueled by conscious and unconscious bias. Finding bias is not as simple as finding a decision to be “unfair.” There are dozens of definitions of gender fairness, from keeping gendered data out of credit decisions to ensuring equal likelihood of granting credit to men and women. It is important to start with defining fairness because financial services providers need to start with an articulation of what they mean when they say they pursue gender fairness. Defining and pursuing fairness is then, followed by a recognition of where biases emerge. Finally, there are many implementable bias mitigation strategies relevant to financial institutions. Mitigating bias requires intentionality at all levels. These strategies are equally relevant for algorithm developers and decision makers alike.
What you will learn
- What is algorithmic bias?
- Why does it matter especially now?
- Where does it emerge?
- How might it be mitigated?
- How do we make AI-based finance work for women?
Host & Moderator: Matthew Gamser, CEO, SME Finance Forum
About the speakers
Sonja Kelly is the global lead for Women’s World Banking research. Through research on the financial sector, policy trends, financial services providers, and end users, Sonja and her team advocate for women’s financial inclusion. Before joining Women’s World Banking, she advised the U.S. Department of State on strategy for U.S. Embassy engagement in digital finance around the world. She has served as the director of research at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion, has held consulting roles at the World Bank and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), and has worked in microfinance at Opportunity International. Sonja holds a PhD in International Relations from American University where she researched financial inclusion policy and regulation.
Rachel Freeman is Executive Director and Chief Growth Officer of Tyme Global. Tyme Global is both the technology and solutions firm powering Tyme Bank, the first digital bank in South Africa with now 2.3 million customers. Rachel Freeman is an experienced and internationally recognized financial expert, particularly in the areas of financial inclusion and innovative financial technologies. Before joining Tyme, Ms. Freeman served as the IFC Financial Institutions Advisory Manager for Asia since 2014. In her role, she led IFC’s advisory program for existing and potential investee clients for value enhancement and development impact, to achieve IFC's goals in financial inclusion and climate change mitigation. In her role, Rachel was one of the founders of AFIN and the APIX Platform. Since 2001 she had several senior positions at IFC in Central Asia, Africa and Asia. Prior to joining IFC, Rachel was involved in several entrepreneurial ventures in the US and Russia She holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Business School and a degree in International Politics and Economics/Russian from Middlebury College. She also attended Executive Education at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Dietmar Bohmer joined Tyme 5 years ago, currently based in Singapore he built up their analytics and data team as well as overseeing the design and build of the Data Lake and Advanced Analytics platform with ML pipeline. TymeBank is South Africa’s first fully licensed fully digital bank that is founded on simplicity, transparency and affordability. Dietmar has a BSc (Hons) in Actuarial Mathematics from the University of Pretoria. He lectured in the Actuarial field for a couple of years before he joined the banking sector 17 years ago. He spent time at Nedbank and Standard Bank, leading and building various lending, data science, machine learning and big data teams.
Puneet Gupta is Co-Founder of Kaleidofin, a fintech platform that propels under-banked customers towards meeting their real life goals by providing intuitive and tailored financial solutions. Puneet is passionate about delivering financial services at scale. He believes that the power of technology can be harnessed to amplify the role financial services can play in the lives of customers. Prior to Kaleidofin, he co-founded the IFMR group and was the group CFO of IFMR Holdings. He conceptualized and started IFMR Rural Finance, a wealth management focused technology platform enabling deep customer centricity. He raised $150 million of equity funding for IFMR Group. He was part of the founding microfinance team at ICICI Bank, where he worked on development of new channels for reaching out to micro financial and rural financial services, also extensively worked on creating facilitative infrastructure for the delivery of micro financial services. He is a Director in the Governing Board of the IIT Madras’ Rural Technology Business Incubator. He has an MBA, Institute of Rural Management Anand. 
Daniel Awe is the Head of Africa Fintech Foundry, an establishment with an overall objective to Scout, search, identify ideas that can be incubated and accelerated to add real value (commercialisation or social impact) to the eco-system or wider society. In addition, AFF is an Innovation Hub for new Technology Ideas that will shape the future of Financial Technology. Daniel is an experienced Payment Solution architect that previously led the Channels Solution Delivery Group in Access Bank before his appointment to Head Africa Fintech Foundry. Daniel spent the last 15 years innovating and creating cutting edge ePayment platforms in the financial sector. Daniel is equipped with a wealth of experience around Leadership, Management, Strategy, CX Transformation, Design Thinking, Solution Architecture, Enterprise Capability, Agile Project Management, and a unique forte to identify and nurture innovative opportunities. Daniel graduated with a B.Sc. Honors in Electronics with Computer Engineering from the Lagos State University and Advanced Leadership and Management program from the prestigious IMD.
A summary will be posted here>
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