FairPlay Team

Leadership

Kareem Saleh
Founder, CEO
Kareem has been working on financial inclusion and underwriting hard-to-score borrowers his entire career. At ZestFinance (now Zest.ai) he worked with lenders to adopt AI underwriting. At SoftCard he worked with retailers, financial institutions and tech companies to democratize mobile payments. In the Obama Administration he helped manage the team that negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement, and oversaw $3B in annual investments into development-friendly projects in emerging markets. He’s a contributor to Forbes on AI in financial services and loves boxing, poker and hip hop.
John Merril, Ph.D.​
Co-Founder, CTO
John is a mathematician and computer scientist with deep expertise in applying AI to financial services. He spent 10 years at Microsoft creating AI-powered virtual assistants and five years at Google building tools to help advertisers harness the power of machine learning. He was the principal scientist at ZestFinance (now Zest.ai) where he was among the first to apply complex machine learning algorithms to consumer loan underwriting. He holds 10 patents on the application of AI in consumer finance and moonlights as a video game designer and opera singer.

Leadership

Kareem Saleh

​Founder, CEO

Kareem has been working on financial inclusion and underwriting hard-to-score borrowers his entire career. At ZestFinance (now Zest.ai) he worked with lenders to adopt AI underwriting. At SoftCard he worked with retailers, financial institutions and tech companies to democratize mobile payments. In the Obama Administration he helped manage the team that negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement, and oversaw $3B in annual investments into development-friendly projects in emerging markets. He’s a contributor to Forbes on AI in financial services and loves boxing, poker and hip hop.

John Merril, Ph.D.​

Co-Founder, CTO

John is a mathematician and computer scientist with deep expertise in applying AI to financial services. He spent 10 years at Microsoft creating AI-powered virtual assistants and five years at Google building tools to help advertisers harness the power of machine learning. He was the principal scientist at ZestFinance (now Zest.ai) where he was among the first to apply complex machine learning algorithms to consumer loan underwriting. He holds 10 patents on the application of AI in consumer finance and moonlights as a video game designer and opera singer.

Our Team

Team members come from a diverse range of technology and financial services backgrounds including Google, Microsoft, NASA, Elementary Robotic, and the U.S. Government.

Melissa Lafsky
Comms/Branding
Mark Eberstein
EVP Data Science
Michael Van Veen
VP Engineering
Howard Postley
Distinguished Engineer
Kim Gerhardt
Partnerships
Josh Hershman
EVP of Insurance
Tom OSCHERWITZ
Public Policy & Regulatory Affairs
Mark Jones
Senior Director of DevSecOps
Rae Hanley
Sr. Technical Product Manager

Interested in Joining Our Team?

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