Year: 2019

Google this morning unveiled a pair of new Android features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. As the company notes in a blog post this morning, the WHO estimates that 900 million people will be living with heading loss by 2055. The ubiquity of mobile devices — Android in particular — offers a promising potential to help open the lines of communication.

Live Transcribe is, perhaps, the more compelling of the two offerings. As its name implies, the feature transcribes audio in real-time, so users with hearing loss can read text, in order to enable a live, two-way conversation. It defaults to white text on a black background, making it easier to read and can also connect to external microphones for better results.

The feature leverages much of the company’s work in speech to text and translation. It starts rolling out today in limited beta for Pixel 3 users. It will be available in more than 70 languages and dialects.

Announced back at last year’s Google I/O, Sound Amplifier is designed to filter out ambient and unwanted noises, without boosting the volume on already loud sounds. The feature works with headphones, letting users manually adjust the settings for the right fit. That one is available now via the Play Store.

Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories have been making a comeback, thanks to Netflix’s adoption of the format for kids TV and other interactive tales, like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” as well as earlier efforts, like HBO’s Mosaic. Now Amazon is testing out the genre for Alexa devices, with the launch of professionally performed, voice-controlled narratives from the publisher of the original Choose Your Own Adventure book series, ChooseCo.

You may remember ChooseCo from its lawsuit with Netflix over the Black Mirror episode. The company claims that Netflix never acquired the proper license to use the “Choose Your Own Adventure” trademark.

But clearly, ChooseCo still aims to benefit from the attention, and from Netflix’s ability to make this storytelling gimmick popular with a younger generation of tech-savvy consumers.

In collaboration with Amazon’s Audible division, the two companies are together releasing a (properly licensed) Alexa skill that will bring ChooseCo’s Choose Your Own Adventure stories to life on Alexa-powered devices, like Echo smart speakers, which are controlled through voice commands.

The voice skill itself was jointly designed by Audible, ChooseCo and the Alexa team, and will launch with two narratives to start: “The Abominable Snowman,” which takes listeners to the peaks of Himalayas in search of the yeti, and “Journey Under the Sea,” which ventures to the underwater Lost City of Atlantis.

The former offers 28 total endings and the latter offers 37.

Instead of Alexa’s robotic voice, the stories are narrated by voice actors Josh Hurley (Abominable Snowman), and Stephanie Einstein (Journey Under the Sea.)

Those of a certain age will remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure stories as kids, but these Alexa versions are meant to entertain all ages, Audible claims. Of course, it’s debatable how often adults will want to listen to fantastic but familiar tales like this, after satisfying their initial curiosity following the format’s smart speaker debut.

The stories will vary in length, depending on which narrative branch listeners take, but can provide “hours” of entertainment, Audible tells TechCrunch. In addition to responding to the questions about what to do next, you can also use voice commands like “go back,” “start over,” and “change story” to navigate the app.

Currently, the stories are free, as is the skill. Audible declined to say if a subscription or in-app purchases would be offered at a later date in order to provide listeners with access to more stories. Likely, the skill’s future is still being considered – for now, the companies are looking to see if consumers adopt and engage with the format on voice devices, or if the skill flops.

If the stories take off, however, others could be sold or Amazon could even opt to bundle the stories into its Audible Channels offering, which is used to entice Prime subscriber sign-ups.

To try the stories out yourself, you can say “Alexa, open Choose Your Own Adventure from Audible.” This will enable the skill so you can get started.

The stories begin with a warning similar to those you might remember from the kids’ books – that this story is different, and that “you alone are in charge of what happens.” It warns you that there are dangers, adventures and consequences ahead, and that your choices could “end in disaster…or even death!”

The stories then progress as you’d expect, with a bit of narrative before asking you to pick the next path. On Alexa devices with a screen, some simple illustrations are shown.

Audible’s new Choose Your Own Adventure stories aren’t the only example of this format coming to audio. In addition to ChooseCo’s own online audio-based games, there’s also a comedy game show that uses the format, and The NYT even tried a choose-your-own-news adventure in 2017. There are also skills for interactive stories, that aren’t using the ChooseCo trademark.

The official Audible skill is here on the Alexa Skills store.

 

Another week, another set of scandals at Facebook and Google . This past week, my colleagues reported that Facebook and Google had abused Apple enterprise developer certificates in order to distribute info-scraping research apps, at times from underage users in the case of Facebook. Apple responded by cutting off both companies from developer accounts, before shortly restoring them.

The media went into overdrive over the scandals, as predictable as the companies’ statements that they truly care about users and their privacy. But will anything change?

I think we know the answer to this question: no. And it is never going to change because the vast majority of users just don’t care one iota about privacy or these scandals.

Privacy advocates will tell you that the lack of a wide boycott against Google and particularly Facebook is symptomatic of a lack of information: if people really understood what was happening with their data, they would galvanize immediately for other platforms. Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.

I don’t believe more information would help, and I reject the mentality behind it. It’s reminiscent of the political policy expert who says that if only voters had more information — if they just understood the issue — they would change their mind about something where they are clearly in the “wrong.” It’s incredibly condescending, and obscures a far more fundamental fact about consumers: people know what they value, they understand it, and they are making an economic choice when they stick with Google or Facebook.

Alternatives exist for every feature and app offered by these companies, and they are not hard to find. You can use Signal for chatting, DuckDuckGo for search, FastMail for email, 500px or Flickr for photos, and on and on. Far from being shameless clones of their competitors, in many cases these products are even superior to their originals, with better designs and novel features.

And yet. When consumers start to think about the costs, they balk. There’s sometimes the costs of the products themselves (FastMail is $30/year minimum, but really $50 a year or more if you want reasonable storage), but more importantly are the switching costs that come with using a new product. I have 2,000 contacts on Facebook Messenger — am I just supposed to text them all to use Signal from now on? Am I supposed to completely relearn a new photos app, when I am habituated to the taps required from years of practice on Instagram?

Surveillance capitalism has been in the news the past few weeks thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 704-page tome of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps (credit scores and the reporting bureaus are a whole other beast). There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.

One of the lessons I have learned — perhaps the most important you can learn about consumer products — is just how much people are willing to give up for free things. They are willing to give up privacy for free email. They are willing to allow their stock broker to help others actively trade against them for a free stock brokerage account with free trading. People love free stuff, particularly when the harms are difficult to perceive.

This is not to say that Facebook and Google shouldn’t try to improve their shoddy records on privacy, or rebuild trust with users. Those consumers are always able to leave, and their sentiment should never be taken for granted. But after more than a decade of abuse, we should look deeper at our analysis and perhaps conclude that these issues aren’t abuse at all, but rather a bargain, a negotiation, and one that people are quite willing to live with.

China’s influence pushed MSCI to add shares to index

MSCI runs some of the most important financial indexes in the world. Trillions of dollars of capital are pegged to these metrics, which is why changes to them can be so controversial. Few decisions by MSCI have been as significant though as the addition of Chinese “A-shares” to its emerging markets indexes last year, which for the first time added mainland Chinese stocks to these important benchmarks. Billions of dollars of capital was expected to flow to those stocks, as wealth managers matched their allocations to the updated indexes.

Now, we have learned just how much pressure MSCI faced in adding those shares. Mike Bird at the Wall Street Journal reports that China placed enormous pressure on MSCI to change its indexes, threatening to cut off its access to domestic wealth managers and stunt its growth in the number two economy. From the article:

MSCI’s discussions with several Chinese asset managers were abruptly curtailed in 2015 and 2016 after the firm didn’t add Chinese-listed stocks to the emerging-markets index following its midyear reviews, according to people close to or directly involved in the discussions. The Chinese firms communicated that they had been instructed by authorities to cut off negotiations with MSCI, the people said.

China’s two national stock exchanges also threatened to withdraw MSCI’s access to market pricing data, which the company provided to its customers all over the world, the people added. It was akin to “business blackmail,” said a person familiar with MSCI’s negotiations with Chinese regulatory authorities.

Companies the world over attempt to manipulate these indexes, particularly given the increasing amount of money flowing to ETFs and other index-backed funds. But few companies have the clout required to actually get MSCI to make changes that benefit them. China, with its huge market, clearly does.

MSCI is “now considering quadrupling China’s weighting in the emerging-markets index.” Maybe that’s objective and fair — after all, China is crucial for the global economy. With China’s meddling and MSCI’s capitulation though, one has to wonder how much is blackmail, and how much is financial science.

More links

• Behind Tech’s Shine, Some Warnings Signs Appear | The New York Times
• India takes aim at popular Chinese social media apps | Financial Times
• Tencent-backed Chinese movie-ticketing app Maoyan makes weak Hong Kong debut | Reuters
• Lawmakers Vow to Modernize Congress, One Modem at a Time | WSJ

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Warby Parker is today introducing virtual try-on to let shoppers select a pair of frames and instantly see how they look.

The tech was built on Apple’s ARKit, and the feature is only available to users on the Warby Parker iOS app on an iPhone X or later.

Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, attempted to implement a virtual try-on feature on its website, but pulled the feature shortly after it debuted. The issue?

With something like glasses, virtual try-on needs to be as close to reality as possible. Virtual objects can’t be overlaid ‘close to’ the user’s face, but rather match up with all their facial curves, and the placement of the ears, eyes and nose.

“It was really our first time building out a full AR feature as a company, and there were two things that were really important,” said Sr. Director of E-Commerce and Consumer Insights Erin Collins. “The first was getting fit right, which was a technical challenge that required a bunch of revisions. And the second thing was making sure the frame images looked as photorealistic as possible, which meant getting 3D artists to digital render them and lots of revisions to get it pixel perfect on each pair of frames.”

The technology Warby Parker built uses a proprietary algorithm to perfectly place virtual frames on the user’s face. The feature also allows users to quickly snap a screenshot and share with others to get feedback on the frames.

Since inception, Warby Parker developed its ecommerce brand on the back of a relatively low-tech feature: in-home try-on. The company simply sent users five frames of their choice to try on at home and send back later, once they’d made their purchasing decision.

Collins sees the new virtual try-on as a great compliment to that program, while offering a quick and convenient experience for repeat buyers.

“This will make it easier for returning customers to buy glasses without trying them on, but we’re really excited about it as a tool for people to narrow down their home try-on choices,” said Collins.

Warby Parker has raised a total of nearly $300 million in funding from investors such as T.Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and General Catalyst.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is as hot as any enterprise technology at the moment, as companies look for ways to marry their legacy systems with a more modern flavor of automation. Catalytic, a startup from the midwest is putting its own flavor on RPA, aiming at more unstructured data. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment.

The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart and Hyde Park Angel. Today’s round brings the total raised to almost $42 million, according to the company.

RPA helps automate highly mundane processes. Sean Chou, Catalytic co-founder and CEO says there are a couple of ways his company’s solution diverts from his competition, which includes companies like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UIPath.

For starters, Chou says, his company’s solution concentrates on unstructured data like pulling information from documents or emails using a variety of techniques, depending on requirements. It could be old-fashioned scanning and OCR or more modern natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements.

It is designed like all RPA tools to take humans out of the loop when it comes to the most mundane business processes, but as Chou says, his company wants human employees in the loop whenever needed, whether that’s exception processing or tasks that are simply too challenging to program at the moment.

The company launched in 2015 using money Chou had earned from the sale of his previous company Fieldglass, which he had sold the previous year to SAP for more than $1 billion dollars. Fieldglass helped with outsourcing, and as Chou developed that company, he saw a growing problem around automating certain tedious business processes, especially when they touched legacy systems inside an organization. He raised $3.1 million in seed money from Boldstart Ventures in NYC in 2016 and began building out the product in earnest.

Today, Catalytic has a dozen customers, including Bosch, the German manufacturing conglomerate. It employs 60 people in its Chicago headquarters. While its investors come from the coasts, Catalytic is building a company in the heart of the midwest, a part of the country that has often been left out of the startup economy.

With $30 million Catalytic can begin expanding the number of employees, including helping service its large customers, building out it partner network with other software companies and systems integrators, and bringing in more engineering talent to continue building out the product.

The product is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.

In its latest monitoring report of a voluntary Code of Conduct on illegal hate speech, which platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube signed up to in Europe back in 2016, the European Commission has said progress is being made on speeding up takedowns but tech firms are still lagging when it comes to providing feedback and transparency around their decisions.

Tech companies are now assessing 89% of flagged content within 24 hours, with 72% of content deemed to be illegal hate speech being removed, according to the Commission — compared to just 40% and 28% respectively when the Code was first launched more than two years ago.

However it said today that platforms still aren’t giving users enough feedback vis-a-vis reports, and has urged more transparency from platforms — pressing for progress “in the coming months”, warning it could still legislate for a pan-EU regulation if it believes it’s necessary.

Giving her assessment of how the (still) voluntary code on hate speech takedowns is operating at a press briefing today, commissioner Vera Jourova said: “The only real gap that remains is transparency and the feedback to users who sent notifications [of hate speech].

“On average about a third of the notifications do not receive a feedback detailing the decision taken. Only Facebook has a very high standard, sending feedback systematically to all users. So we would like to see progress on this in the coming months. Likewise the companies should be more transparent towards the general public about what is happening in their platforms. We would like to see them make more data available about the notices and removals.”

“The fight against illegal hate speech online is not over. And we have no signs that such content has decreased on social media platforms,” she added. “Let me be very clear: The good results of this monitoring exercise don’t mean the companies are off the hook. We will continue to monitor this very closely and we can always consider additional measures if efforts slow down.”

Jourova flagged additional steps taken by the Commission to support the overarching goal of clearing what she dubbed a “sewage of words” off of online platforms, such as facilitating data-sharing between tech companies and police forces to help investigations and prosecutions of hate speech purveyors move forward.

She also noted it continues to provide Member States’ justice ministers with briefings on how the voluntary code is operating, warning again: “We always discuss that we will continue but if it slows down or it stops delivering the results we will consider some kind of regulation.”

Germany passed its own social media hate speech takedown law back in 2016, with the so-called ‘NetzDG’ law coming into force in early 2017. The law provides for fines as high as €50M for companies that fail to remove illegal hate speech within 24 hours and has led to social media platforms like Facebook to plough greater resource into locally sited moderation teams.

While, in the UK, the government announced a plan to legislate around safety and social media last year. Although it has yet to publish a White Paper setting out the detail of its policy plan.

Last week a UK parliamentary committee which has been investigating the impacts of social media and screen use among children recommended the government legislate to place a legal ‘duty of care’ on platforms to protect minors.

The committee also called for platforms to be more transparent, urging them to provide bona fide researchers with access to high quality anonymized data to allow for robust interrogation of social media’s effects on children and other vulnerable users.

Debate about the risks and impacts of social media platforms for children has intensified in the UK in recent weeks, following reports of the suicide of a 14 year old schoolgirl — whose father blamed Instagram for exposing her to posts encouraging self harm, saying he had no doubt content she’d been exposed to on the platform had helped kill her.

During today’s press conference, Jourova was asked whether the Commission intends to extend the Code of Conduct on illegal hate speech to other types of content that’s attracting concern, such as bullying and suicide. But she said the executive body is not intending to expand into such areas.

She said the Commission’s focus remains on addressing content that’s judged illegal under existing European legislation on racism and xenophobia — saying it’s a matter for individual Member States to choose to legislate in additional areas if they feel a need.

“We are following what the Member States are doing because we see… to some extent a fragmented picture of different problems in different countries,” she noted. “We are focusing on what is our obligation to promote the compliance with the European law. Which is the framework decision against racism and xenophobia.

“But we have the group of experts from the Member States, in the so-called Internet forum, where we speak about other crimes or sources of hatred online. And we see the determination on the side of the Member States to take proactive measures against these matters. So we expect that if there is such a worrying trend in some Member State that will address it by means of their national legislation.”

“I will always tell you I don’t like the fragmentation of the legal framework, especially when it comes to digital because we are faced with, more or less, the same problems in all the Member States,” she added. “But it’s true that when you [take a closer look] you see there are specific issues in the Member States, also maybe related with their history or culture, which at some moment the national authorities find necessary to react on by regulation. And the Commission is not hindering this process.

“This is the sovereign decision of the Member States.”

Four more tech platforms joined the voluntary code of conduct on illegal hate speech last year: — namely Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Dailymotion. While French gaming platform Webedia (jeuxvideo.com) also announced their participation today.

Drilling down into the performance of specific platforms, the Commission’s monitoring exercise found that Facebook assessed hate speech reports in less than 24 hours in 92.6% of the cases and 5.1% in less than 48 hours. The corresponding performance figures for YouTube were 83.8 % and 7.9%; and for Twitter 88.3% and 7.3%, respectively.

While Instagram managed 77.4 % of notifications assessed in less than 24 hours. And Google+, which will in any case closes to consumers this April, managed to assess just 60%.

In terms of removals, the Commission found YouTube removed 85.4% of reported content, Facebook 82.4% and Twitter 43.5% (the latter constituting a slight decrease in performance vs last year). While Google+ removed 80.0% of the content and Instagram 70.6%.

It argues that despite social media platforms removing illegal content “more and more rapidly”, as a result of the code, this has not led to an “over-removal” of content — pointing to variable removal rates as an indication that “the review made by the companies continues to respect freedom of expression”.

“Removal rates varied depending on the severity of hateful content,” the Commission writes. “On average, 85.5% of content calling for murder or violence against specific groups was removed, while content using defamatory words or pictures to name certain groups was removed in 58.5 % of the cases.”

“This suggest that the reviewers assess the content scrupulously and with full regard to protected speech,” it adds.

It is also crediting the code with helping foster partnerships between civil society organisations, national authorities and tech platforms — on key issues such as awareness raising and education activities.

Micromobility startup Lime, the company that operates shared electric scooters and bikes, has brought on its first chief marketing officer and appointed its first chief technology officer. Duke Stump, now CMO at Lime, is joining the company from Lululemon, where he served as EVP of Brand and Community.

Li Fan, who served as Lime’s head of engineering, is now assuming the role of CTO. During her short time (seven months), Fan has tripled the size of the engineering team. Before joining Lime, Fan was SVP of Engineering at Pinterest, and also previously served as a senior director of engineering at Google.

“Duke and Li will be tremendous assets to Lime’s executive leadership team. Duke’s global marketing expertise and experience growing some of the most iconic consumer brands will be instrumental to further Lime’s mission of micro-mobility,” Lime CEO and co-founder Toby Sun said in a statement. “Lime is constantly working to improve rider experience and Li’s dedication to this goal is unparalleled. Her successful track record and leadership skills are widely respected throughout the company and she is the perfect fit for this role.”

Lime, which got its beginnings as a bike-share company, has deployed its scooters in over 100 cities in the U.S. and 27 international cities. Since June, Lime has more than doubled the number of cities where it operates in the U.S. Lime has also partnered with Uber to offer Lime scooters within the Uber app.

Japanese messaging app company Line is pumping 20 billion JPY ($182 million) into its mobile payment business as it tries to turn things around following a challenging year in 2018.

The company announced the infusion into Line Pay, a subsidiary that it fully owns, in a filing which stated that the new capital is “necessary funds for its future business operation.” No further details were provided.

The investment comes on the heels of Line’s latest financial report which saw it post a 5.79 billion JPY loss as revenue grew by 24 percent to reach 207.18 billion JPY in 2018. Line has long been a top money maker in the App Store, but its efforts to build out content around its messaging platform and games division have turned out to be expensive, with a job service, manga platform and e-commerce business among its ventures.

In addition to additional content, payments are also seen as ‘glue’ that can increase engagement within the Line ecosystem and its main messaging app.

The company is going after the cashless opportunity in Japan, where it is the dominant chat app with an estimated 50 million registered users. The country is notable for its continued use of cash, but the government is using the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games as an opportunity to move towards a digital future. Aside from its core Line Pay service, which sits inside the Line chat app, Line is introducing its own credit card with Visa and it has gone after Chinese tourists through a tie-in with Tencent, the internet giant behind China’s top messaging app WeChat.

Outside of Japan, Line Pay is also available in Thailand (where it works with the Bangkok metro provider), Taiwan (where it counts two banks as partners) and Indonesia, which Line says are its next three largest markets in terms of user numbers. Together, across those four countries, Line claims it has 165 million monthly active users and 40 million registered Line Pay users. Line said GMV reached 55 billion JPY ($482 million) per month back in November 2017, there’s been no update since.

The service was launched more widely but it has shuttered in other markets, including Singapore where it was ended in February 2018.

Beyond payment, Line is also moving into banking and financial services. It is working to launch a digital bank in Japan and last year it announced plans to investigate the potential to roll out loans, insurance and other services backed by its own cryptocurrency. While it didn’t hold an ICO — its ‘Link’ token is earned or can be bought on exchanges — Line did dive into crypto in a major way, opening its own exchange and starting a crypto investment fund, too. With the bear market in full effect, and token valuations dropping by 90 percent across the board, we haven’t heard too much more from Line on its crypto plans.

WhatsApp users updating to the latest version of the messaging app on iOS will find a new setting lurking at the bottom of the ‘Privacy’ menu that adds support for Apple’s biometric authentication technologies.

Under the new setting, called ‘Screen Lock’, users of WhatsApp on iOS can tap through to another menu to add an additional layer of security by requiring either their facial biometric or a fingerprint to unlock the messaging app.

iPhone users are either offered the ability to ‘require Face ID’ or ‘require Touch ID’ depending on their handset hardware.

The change, in version 2.19.20 of the WhatsApp iOS app, is listed as: 

Aire, the U.K. startup that wants to give the credit scoring system a 21st century “upgrade,” has raised $11 million in Series B funding. The round is backed by European enterprise VC Crane Venture Partners, with strategic investments from Experian Ventures and Orange Digital Ventures.

Existing investors WhiteStar Capital and Sunstone Capital also followed on, while the company says it will use the additional capital to support “rapid growth,” including U.S. expansion. Aire also plans to further invest in the technology powering its credit insights engine, which aims to make credit checking fairer for consumers who may have a thin credit file, and therefore more valuable to lenders.

“How does a new borrower bypass the catch-22 problem of credit where it takes a while to get a history, but you need credit to start a history…,” says Aire co-founder and CEO Aneesh Varma, when asked the describe the problem the startup set out to solve.

“The system today doesn’t seem to serve everyone, even if they are deserving. Our solution focuses on an approach: The consumer is the best and deepest source of real data about themselves. This first-party data is the only way… [to] deliver win-win outcomes for both the consumer and the lender”.

To solve this conundrum, Varma says Aire can be likened to the role of a “manual underwriter” who tries to better understand a credit applicant’s life and financial situation, but delivered via technology in an automated and scalable way.

“Our main product today steps in to engage with an applicant on a lender’s website when the existing decision engine is unable to reach a full decision,” he explains. “We enable the consumer to supply relevant financial data to us about their circumstances. This is beyond just transactional banking data, and therefore gives us a full picture… looking forward, not just the historical snapshot”

On the backend, Aire’s platform accesses that data to provide ready-to-use outputs for its lending partners to use in real-time. The system is designed to get smarter over time, too, as more performance data of outstanding loans becomes available.

“[This is] where machine learning is very relevant). We also keep researching other methods and data streams that consumers can bring to us, while being on the right side of the privacy concerns,” says Varma.

One of the challenges faced by any company wishing to upgrade credit scoring by employing new data points and machine-learning is not to replicate the existing biases that are arguably ripe within the current system. This is something Varma says he and Aire take very seriously, having experienced some of those prejudices first hand himself.

“We are very insistent on a strong model governance process to ensure we are not biasing against certain individuals or protected traits. This is welded into our culture at Aire,” he says.

“First you have to know what are the biases that exist in the current system that you need to tackle. And then it requires doing the grunt work to involve real human checking and cross-calibrating the models… The challenges we are seeing with algorithms with big tech today are often because some of these companies taking the easy road out. They need to walk in that uncomfortable forest. It’s essential”.

To date, Aire says its algorithmic model has scored over $10 billion of credit across various consumer credit categories, which it reckons gives the startup a competitive advantage as the model improves with both data quantity and quality. The company claims to help lenders access more customers without increasing risk appetite, and says it has seen credit approvals increase by up to 19 percent.

On the lender side, Aire’s customers are credit card companies and retail finance (ie checkout financing), although Varma says longer term finance is also on the roadmap as the company’s models mature. On the consumer side, Aire typically serves working professionals who are earlier in the financial journey. These include various types of self-employment, such as contractors, freelancers, and those operating within the so-called gig economy.