Feedzai Fairband Named a World-Changing Idea by Fast Company

Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, today announced that Feedzai Fairband – the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework – has been selected as a finalist in the Software category and received an honourable mention in the AI & Data category as part of the 2021 World-Changing Ideas Awards by Fast Company.

Feedzai Fairband addresses a high social impact issue — the discrimination that people face when trying to access to financial services across the world. The technology allows financial institutions to select the machine learning models that perform well for both risk management and fairness, greatly reducing bias in the process. This powerful combination allows companies to protect customers from financial crime, while at the same time keep them safe from bias that could prevent them from opening a bank account or getting a loan due to their ethnicity, gender, location, or other personal information.

“Being part of the selected group of companies that have been recognised by their contributions to make the world a better place fills us with pride,” said Pedro Bizarro, Chief Science Officer at Feedzai. “AI is not enough anymore. Every initiative that leverages this powerful technology needs to implement Responsible AI principles, such as fairness and transparency, and we’re very proud to be the front runners in this space.”

Feedzai Fairband is a patent-pending AutoML algorithm that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models with zero additional model training cost while increasing model fairness by 93 percent on average. With this new technology, Feedzai allows financial institutions across the world to make better and fairer decisions under the premise that protecting consumers from financial crime can and should be done in a Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical (FATE) way. Feedzai has its own FATE-dedicated research group which focuses on several Responsible AI initiatives such as model explainability, bias auditing, algorithmic fairness, and more.

“There is no question our society and planet are facing deeply troubling times. So, it’s important to recognise organisations that are using their ingenuity, impact, design, scalability, and passion to solve these problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have discovered some of the most groundbreaking projects that have launched since the start of 2020.”

The 5th annual awards honour the products, concepts, companies, policies, and designs that are pursuing innovation for the good of society and the planet. The projects are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving health and climate crises, social injustice, or economic inequality.

This award is Feedzai Fairband’s third industry honour since the framework was launched less than two months ago. Feedzai Fairband was also recognised as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year” by Fintech Breakthrough Awards in March and more recently as “RegTech of the Year” in the 2021 Asia FinTech Awards.

Visit Feedzai’s blog to learn more about Responsible AI.