Meet the 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.

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.