SL-7 Innovation and Disruption in the Finance Industry

On our 7th episode we are joined by two very talented women, Siew Choo Soh, Managing Director & Group Head of Consumer Banking and Big Data/AI Technology at DBS Bank and Terisa Roberts, Director and Global Lead: Risk Modelling and Decisioning at SAS.

Siew Choo shares with us DBS’s mindset around innovation. For them, the use of technology does not equate to innovation. They don’t have a designated innovation department, just a small innovation team whose job is not to innovate, it’s rather helping other people across the bank to innovate. They provide resources to enable everyone to be able to innovate by empowering the individuals and teams to be curious.

Terisa draws attention to a recent study by Deloitte, showing that firms who invest in diversity and innovation are 8 times more likely to achieve their business outcomes. She also mentions that in Risk Management, they monitor the algorithms they’re using in society and how these algorithms can discriminate against certain groups. Whenever they are faced with these challenges, a diverse team is in charge of identifying and remediating these biases.

Quotes:

"Their job is not to innovate, their job is to help other people across the bank to innovate."

"You have to introduce bias to unbias your algorithm, because the algorithm has been trained by biased data."

"Because of historical biases that were present in the training data that the algorithms learned from, that was perpetuated. A diverse team would have been able to stop that bias from becoming operational in the way decisions are made within that firm."

"To make them understand each other from the different background they have, whether from cultural perspective or job experience perspective, can sometimes be quite a challenge, but I would say that once you manage to go through that initial phase you’ll see that it will help you get the best results, if you have a very diverse group of people."

Thanks to our sponsors:

Shine Solutions Group

Talent Insights

SAS

Women in Analytics (WIA) Network

Growing Data

Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 7

Enjoy the seventh episode of our #SheLeads Series!

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