A panel discussion: putting the ‘why’ back into data
Our Founder and CEO recently joined Altair to debate how cutting edge data can be correctly brought into the hands of the consumer.
At the heart of Aire sits our ability to unlock new data sources to truly benefit the consumer when it comes to credit scoring. This requires us to think differently and to look forward — allowing us to deploy cutting edge data technology to drive innovation in the credit sector.
With this in mind, last week our Founder and CEO, Aneesh Varma, joined a panel of data experts to debate the future of augmented analytics.
Part of Altair’s ‘Future Purpose’ webinar series, Aneesh the panel included Eric Daly, from Philip Morris International, Minna Karha, from Finnair and Aritra Chakravarty from Project Imagine.
Ahead of the debate, Aneesh framed his thinking around the potential of augmented analytics as follows:
‘Proper interrogation of the huge number of data sources already around us will enable us to make better, more informed decisions on an incomparable scale to what’s come before. Done right, data analytics has the power to solve real problems for real people, giving society the chance to bring everyone to the same starting line.’
Attracting attendees from across the world and spanning diverse disciplines, from finance to the environment, engineering to computing, the discussion focused around the importance of bringing the key attributes of human intelligence to augmented analytics.
With this in mind, Aneesh encouraged the panel to look forward:
‘How do you get ahead of some of the problems consumers face?’
‘At Aire, an example for us is our work around identifying a consumer’s risk of financial difficulty. Your customer may not have defaulted yet, but it’s coming. So how can lenders get in early enough to reach the consumer before this happens so the consumer never reaches this point?’
‘These ideas are hard to deploy. They come with a great many challenges, for example, we don’t want to be invasive for consumers and we don’t want to go against the moral or ethical beliefs of consumers.’
‘Humans have a very interesting way of understanding their problems. How do we leverage technology to do that?’
The panel also discussed the place for augmented analytics across different sectors. Aneesh added to this, commenting that the importance of stringent regulation (as well as the obvious nervousness around analytics and advanced algorithms that can come with it) is something that all of us involved in new data technologies should be mindful of.
‘Within financial services, heavy regulation means the deployment of newer technologies takes longer to do. This is rightly in place to protect consumers — but it limits our ability to move fast.’
The hour-long discussion ended with an obvious nod to how business has been altered by the recent outbreak of Coronavirus. When asked what has changed, Aneesh responded with optimism:
‘Consumer patterns have definitely changed — but we can also build out better tools to serve them.’
Thanks to Sean and the Altair team for including Aire on the discussion panel — you can now access the recording of the session here.
