FairPlay helps banks, credit unions, and fintechs embed fairness into their marketing, underwriting, pricing, and collections algorithms as well as automate their fair lending compliance. Financial institutions use FairPlay’s APIs to stay compliant, improve model performance, and ensure decisions are equitable and auditable. With over 300 million decisions analyzed monthly, FairPlay cuts model validation time by up to 80% while keeping models fair, profitable and fully governed.
I started FairPlay because the issue of fairness in lending is deeply personal to me. My parents immigrated to the United States from Africa in the early 1970s. They were highly educated, spoke perfect English, and wanted to start a small business—but they couldn’t get a modest loan. That denial had real consequences for our family. From a young age, I came to understand that credit is the sine qua non of modern life—without it, you’re locked out of opportunity.
That experience stayed with me and shaped my career. I’ve spent most of my professional life working on the problem of underwriting borrowers who are hard to score—people with thin credit files, no files, or those who’ve experienced a financial setback. I’ve done this work in emerging markets like Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and later inside the U.S. government, where I got a look at how underwriting works at some of the world’s most prestigious financial institutions.
What shocked me was how primitive and biased many of these underwriting systems still were. Even at the commanding heights of global finance, underwriting models often led to disparities. Not because the people building the models had bad intentions, but because of data limitations and flawed modeling assumptions.
This realization lit the spark that animated the creation of FairPlay.
Around the same time, I started noticing a shift in the academic world. Researchers at places like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon were developing new AI fairness techniques—approaches that allowed machine learning models to perform accurately but also more equitably, especially when dealing with underrepresented populations. My team and I saw real promise in these ideas, so we persuaded a major mortgage originator to let us run a pilot using some of these techniques.
The results were eye-opening. We showed that by applying these AI fairness techniques, this lender could have increased approvals for Black applicants by around 10%—without taking on additional risk. That was the “aha” moment. Here were powerful, proven methods to make lending fairer, and yet nobody in the industry was really using them.
Our answer was to take these fairness techniques out of academia and put them into practice. We decided to build a platform that would allow lenders to embed fairness directly into their decision-making systems. That’s how FairPlay was born—a company focused on providing Fairness-as-a-Service, so lenders and insurance carriers could de-bias digital decisions in real time.
But our vision goes beyond lending. As more and more of life’s big decisions—getting a job, a kidney transplant, qualifying for government benefits—are made by algorithms, we believe fairness has to be part of the technology stack. Just like Google built search infrastructure for the internet, or Stripe built payments infrastructure, FairPlay is building fairness infrastructure—solutions that ensure high-stakes algorithms give everyone a chance to compete.
So yes, FairPlay was born from personal experience. But it’s also a response to a massive, unaddressed market need—and a belief that we can build technology that helps unlock opportunity for everyone.
We have a wide range of partners in the banking, telecom, and fintech sectors including Chime, Upgrade, Pathward, Octane, and Splash among many others. FairPlay customers use our fairness-as-a-service solutions to increase approval rates, increase take rates, and increase positive outcomes. We help partners launch new models in days, not months, while laying the foundation for rigorous measurement and fine tuning as models develop in complexity.
A great example of this is our work with Flex. Using FairPlay AI’s tooling, Flex developed RegFlex, an internal AI governance system that turns fair lending into a continuous strategic advantage. Leveraging FairPlay AI’s automated fairness testing, Flex validated over 36,000 credit decisions—confirming no significant approval-rate gaps and ensuring decision inputs weren’t proxies for protected attributes. This rigorous testing unlocked the ability to approve thousands of additional qualified applicants, translating into millions in incremental revenue while surpassing regulatory expectations. RegFlex embeds fairness checks into every stage of model development, enforces cross-team accountability, and requires exploration of less discriminatory alternatives whenever disparities arise.
With FairPlay’s advanced analytics at its core, Flex also launched a research program—powered by operational data from over 8 million rental units—to measure real-world outcomes like eviction risk and financial resilience. By integrating FairPlay’s monitoring and reporting directly into their workflows, Flex not only strengthened regulator and stakeholder trust but also demonstrated tangible customer impact, positioning RegFlex as a blueprint for responsible AI in financial services.
One of the biggest surprises has been just how early many banks and insurance companies still are in their AI and alternative data journeys. While fintechs have long embraced machine learning and big data to drive speed and personalization, many traditional financial institutions are just beginning to explore these technologies in earnest. The rise of large language models and agentic systems has expanded the frontier dramatically—unlocking the potential to transform not just underwriting and risk management, but also compliance, customer support, and even product design.
At FairPlay, we’re helping accelerate this transition. Our platform gives traditional banks and insurers a practical on-ramp to AI by offering turnkey tools for AI testing, optimization, validation, monitoring, and regulatory reporting—capabilities that are essential to deploying advanced models responsibly. Our AI enablement solutions make it easier for risk-averse institutions to experiment with new data and algorithms while staying aligned with compliance expectations. That combination of innovation and discipline is key to helping these organizations realize the full promise of AI.
Our investors have been instrumental to our networks and product innovation. Beyond capital infusion, their strategic guidance and industry expertise have been invaluable. Their network introductions have opened doors to key partnerships with banks, fintechs, and technology providers, accelerating our go-to-market strategy.
Moreover, our investors actively engage in product development discussions, offering real-world perspectives on customer pain points and market trends. This collaboration sharpens our AI models and enhances user experience, ensuring our solutions address current and future needs. Their belief in long-term vision empowers us to invest in cutting-edge AI technologies that set us apart in a competitive landscape.
FairPlay is an AI enablement company. As the financial services industry races to adopt AI—whether through predictive models or autonomous agents—FairPlay provides the infrastructure to help institutions build, test, deploy, and continuously orchestrate and optimize their decisioning systems. Our platform enables partners to extract more precision, speed, and strategic value from their AI models while embedding fairness, transparency, and regulatory alignment at every step.
We see massive opportunity ahead as decisioning moves beyond traditional credit and underwriting into broader applications across marketing, fraud detection, servicing, and even autonomous agents that act on behalf of institutions. These systems make consequential decisions in the real world, and ensuring they do so responsibly is not optional—it’s mission-critical. That’s where FairPlay thrives.
By offering a suite of solutions that combine technical rigor with practical usability, we’re helping banks, insurers, and fintechs not just adopt AI, but do so in ways that are trusted, compliant, and performance-enhancing. The next wave of financial innovation will be driven by institutions that can pair advanced AI with governance, and FairPlay is building the tools to make that future possible.
