MAS-led Consortium Issues White Papers for Responsible Use of AI
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Friday announced the release of five white papers to guide the responsible use of AI by financial institutions.
The documents were developed by the 27-member Veritas Consortium, led by MAS as part of the Veritas Initiative, a multi-phased collaborative project with the financial industry.
Members of the Veritas Consortium hail from the financial sector and tech giants, with the latter including firms such as Accenture, IBM, and Microsoft.
FEAT principles
The white papers outline methodologies for the incorporation of FEAT principles, which are Fairness, Ethics, Accountability, and Transparency, for adoption as financial institutions develop their AI and data analytics software.
The objective is to establish a framework to quantifiably measure ethical practices in addition to existing qualitative practices. It also offers a methodology to determine how much transparency is needed to explain and interpret predictions of machine learning models.
Four use cases are evaluated, specifically credit risk scoring and customer marketing in banking, as well as predictive underwriting and fraud detection in insurance.
An open-source toolkit was also released on GitHub to help FIs adopt the Fairness Assessment Methodology. The plug-ins are designed to integrate with a financial institution’s IT systems to automate fairness metrics assessment and to offer a visualization of the results.
“The new open-source software, assessment methodologies, and enhanced guidance will further improve the technical capabilities of financial institutions in developing responsible AI for the financial sector,” said Sopnendu Mohanty, the chief Fintech officer at MAS.
“The Veritas initiative continues to deliver tangible outcomes that demonstrate collaborative public-private partnership to drive trust in the adoption of AI technology, enhance confidence, and foster innovation in Singapore's FinTech ecosystem.”
The next phase of the initiative will see the consortium develop additional use cases and run pilots with selected financial institution members to integrate the methodologies with members’ existing governance framework.
MAS is also collaborating with the Infocomm Media Development Authority and the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) to include the Toolkit in the PDPC’s Trustworthy AI testing framework.
Image credit: iStockphoto/alphaspirit
