Paper #5

A General Architecture for a Trustworthy Creditworthiness-Assessment Platform in the Financial Domain

Giandomenico Cornacchia, Vito W. Anelli, Fedelucio Narducci, Azzurra Ragone and Eugenio Di Sciascio

Abstract: The financial domain is making huge advancements thanks to the exploitation of artificial intelligence. As an example, the credit-worthiness-assessment task is now strongly based on Machine Learning algorithms that make decisions independently from humans. Several studies showed remarkable improvement in reliability, customer care, and return on investment. Nonetheless, many users remain sceptical since they perceive the whole as only partially transparent. The trust in the system decision, the guarantee of fairness in the decision-making process, the explanation of the reasons behind the decision are just some of the open challenges for this task. Moreover, from the financial institution's perspective, another compelling problem is credit-repayment monitoring. Even here, traditional models (e.g., credit scorecards) and machine learning models can help the financial institution in identifying, at an early stage, customers that will fall into default on payments. The monitoring task is critical for the debt-repayment success of identifying bad debtors or simply users who are momentarily in difficulty. The financial institution can thus prevent possible defaults and, if possible, meet the debtor's needs. In this work, the authors propose an architecture for a Creditworthiness-Assessment duty that can meet the transparency needs of the customers while monitoring the credit-repayment risk. This preliminary study carried out an experimental evaluation of the component devoted to the credit-score computation and monitoring credit repayments. The study shows that the authors’ architecture can be an effective tool to improve current Credit-scoring systems. Combining a static and a subsequent dynamic approach can correct mistakes made in the first phase and foil possible false positives for good creditors.

Keywords: Credit Scoring; Early Warning; Explainability; Fairness.