The National Fair Housing Alliance partnered with Fairplay, a tech company that specializes in offering “fairness-as-a-service” through its AI-powered tools, to test artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies designed to improve mortgage lending outcomes for historically underserved homebuyers.
Through the partnership, FairPlay will provide fairness methodologies to support NFHA’s Tech Equity Initiative for the second consecutive year. NFHA’s Tech Equity Initiative is a multi-pronged effort designed to eliminate bias and discrimination in algorithmic systems including statistical models, machine learning systems and AI systems.
NFHA and FairPlay will test AI fairness technologies designed to more accurately risk-rank consumers from historically underserved groups. NFHA will disseminate the findings of this AI fairness initiative at conferences and through publications over the course of 2023.
“As we celebrate the 55th year of the Fair Housing Act, we’re excited to partner with FairPlay for a second year to leverage AI fairness techniques in ways that will create better outcomes for people of color in the mortgage market,” NFHA’s Chief Equity Officer, Dr. Michael Akinwumi, said in a press release. “Since being launched in 2021, NFHA’s Tech Equity team has worked with partners like FairPlay to create more fairness for underserved groups, including people of color and women.”
“NFHA has been working to increase the fairness of algorithmic decisioning systems since the 1990s,” FairPlay CEO Kareem Saleh said. “We are delighted to continue our partnership with NHFA to leverage our Fairness-as-a-Service technologies in ways that are good for people, good for profits and good for progress.”
To read more about AI and fair lending, download the Fair Lending special report.