Monday / CS Seminar

October 7th / 12:00 PM

Hybrid / Mudd 3514

Speaker

Jay Budzik, Fifth Third Bank

Talk Title

How AI is Transforming Financial Services - 3 applications and 3 challenges

Abstract

AI is transforming many industries, and financial services is no exception. But banking is high-stakes and highly-regulated. As such, progress adopting AI in finance has been slow compared to other industries. Concerns over transparency, bias and fairness, and risk of inaccuracies have prevented banks from using AI to enhance products and services. However, new methods have emerged that make banking ripe for AI transformation now more than ever before. This talk will describe how we've overcome challenges to unlock the benefits of AI even in highly-regulated financial services applications. I'll describe three applications in which AI is rapidly transforming banking: consumer lending, customer service, and back office/operations, with case studies and examples of real-world impact. I will show how game-theoretic methods are used to explain the outputs of even complex models to everyday people. I'll describe how we make models more fair and equitable, leading to improved outcomes for women and people of color. Finally, I'll describe how predetermined conversation flows and human-machine collaborations are being used to manage risk of inaccuracies so that even the latest GPT models can be used safely. I'll conclude each section with open research questions and leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Biography

Jay Budzik is Senior Vice President, Director AI/ML Model Development and Operations at Fifth Third Bank. Jay oversees AI transformation for consumer products and operations for this Fortune 500 bank with over $200B in assets. Prior to Fifth Third, Jay was CTO at Zest AI, where he led the product, engineering and data science teams that pioneered the use of AI in consumer lending. Zest models are currently used to underwrite over $1 trillion USD in consumer loans annually for clients such as Citibank, Freddie Mac, Discover, Truist, and 100s of credit unions. Earlier in his career, Jay founded and/or served as CTO of several enterprise software companies that used AI to create competitive advantage in the digital advertising and media industries. Jay holds over 40 patents related to his work in AI and machine learning. He earned a Ph. D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University where he was President's Fellow, and a B. S. with honors in Computer Science from The University of Chicago. He lives in Pasadena, California.

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Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/96991416091

Panopto: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=edf85617-940c-4791-a310-b1f6011c8465

DEI Minute: TBA