A conversation between Maik from Taktile and Kareem Saleh from FairPlay about their new partnership and what it means for the future of credit decision-making.
Introduction
Maik (Taktile): Hey Kareem, good to see you. I’m very excited to be chatting today about our partnership announcement and why we’re thrilled to be working closely with FairPlay. I’d also like to tell our audience what this means for them in terms of combining our two products.
Kareem Saleh (FairPlay): We’re really excited about the opportunities presented by this Taktile-FairPlay partnership. We think it’s going to bring a lot of value to customers in both of our ecosystems.
About the Companies
Taktile
Maik: At Taktile, we’re building the leading risk decisioning platform—think of it as a low-code decision engine for credit risk teams. We also offer a data marketplace, ensuring all alternative data is available for credit decisions. We’ve been around for five years now, with 150 people in the company, and we’re selling to banks and fintechs in the US.
FairPlay
Kareem: I’m Kareem Saleh, founder and CEO of FairPlay. We are the AI enablement company for financial services and insurance companies. We allow anybody using algorithms and alternative data to test, optimize, validate, and govern their models and data sources.
Some of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world use our tools to identify and correct blind spots in their AI models, putting those models into production quickly in ways that allow them to make more money and do more good.
The Partnership Vision
Kareem: Our vision for this partnership is that lenders and other model developers will be able to build and host models in Taktile and use FairPlay to test, optimize, and validate those models. We think this will accelerate the path of those models into production and generate revenue creation opportunities while keeping lenders compliant as state regulators and private plaintiffs get more active around the use of alternative data and AI in financial services.
Why This Partnership Matters
Maik: The reason this partnership is so valuable is that while Taktile provides the best credit decision engine in the world, we’re not prescriptive about ensuring the newest techniques in credit modeling with AI and machine learning comply with regulations. That’s where FairPlay excels.
If you’re a chief credit officer, head of credit, or credit analyst at a FinTech or bank, credit either makes you money or loses you money. You need to ensure whatever you do actually works—both from a compliance and business perspective. Having a strong partner who specializes in this, who has learned from some of the top logos in the industry about what you should and shouldn’t do, is invaluable.
Adapting to Economic Uncertainty
Kareem: Given the uncertainty in the economic outlook with inflation and tariffs, folks want to adjust their models quickly. They want to test new data sources and maybe change their approval thresholds to account for choppiness in the macro environment.
One of the things we’re so excited about with this Taktile-FairPlay partnership is the ability to build and host models in Taktile, make adjustments quickly to account for a changing macro environment, and then test, optimize, and validate those models in ways that allow lenders to move expeditiously and adapt rapidly.
At the end of the day, it’s all about having confidence to make decisions and having confidence that your models will perform in the real world as they did in the lab—and that you’re not leaving money on the table.
Supporting Companies at Every Stage of AI Maturity
Maik: We see pioneers in AI adoption as well as customers who want to use Taktile to make a leap forward. How far along does a bank or lender need to be in their AI journey to benefit from FairPlay’s capabilities?
Kareem: We work with companies at almost every stage of maturity in their AI journey. We have some customers who come to us saying, “We’re about to push our first machine learning model into production and we’ve never done that before.” They need handholding for everything from testing and compliance reviews to fixing blind spots and documenting for regulatory purposes.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have very sophisticated clients building and pushing new machine learning models with alternative data every four to six weeks. They need tooling to move really quickly.
One of our most sophisticated customers told me recently: “What we love about working with FairPlay is it adds one day to our model development lifecycle, but we save 60 to 90 days in compliance and model validation reviews.”
Looking Ahead
Kareem: These tools are incredibly powerful, and we’re in the first inning of seeing them deployed in financial services. Ultimately, the question will be: how do you assure yourself that these generative AI models and the agents built on top of them don’t pose a threat either to the safety and soundness of your institution or to the consumers you serve?
Connect With Us
Maik: You can find us at taktile.com and fairplay.ai. Kareem’s in Venice Beach, I’m in New York—you can pick where you want to stop by. I’d pick Kareem!
Thanks everyone for listening and dialing in. Let us know if you have any questions.
Kareem: Thank you Maik, great to see you.
This blog post is based on a podcast conversation between Maik from Taktile and Kareem Saleh from FairPlay discussing their partnership to accelerate AI-powered credit decisioning while ensuring compliance and optimization.
