Alfa, the provider of Alfa Systems, a software platform for asset finance, published the third and final paper in its thought leadership series AI in Equipment and Auto Finance.

Alfa produced Part 3: Moving Forward with Machine Learning in association with Alfa iQ, a partnership between Alfa and Bitfount which works with auto and equipment finance companies to build and deploy machine learning models.

Combining the theoretical insights from Alfa’s position paper Balancing Risk and Reward with the use cases explored in the technical paper Using Machine Learning in the Wild, the new white paper explores the trajectory of machine learning, its uses in auto and equipment finance and how it will continue to advance in the near future. The whitepaper also features an exploration of federated learning and how organizations can use private data to train machine learning models without ever compromising the privacy of that data.

“AI and ML represent an exciting shift for finance providers and, while the benefits are better understood now than they were a couple of years ago, the practical side to acquiring those benefits is still unclear for many,” Martyn Tamerlane, author of the whitepaper and a solution architect at Alfa, said. “Alfa’s aim for this series has been to expose that practical side [and] to demonstrate where ML can help solve problems and make lenders more competitive through its ability to detect patterns in vast amounts of data and feed that into higher-quality, sometimes fully automated, decision making. Then, to show ML taking different forms, first as an in-house framework and secondly relying on AI-as-a-service. Now we consider ML’s continued success, particularly in the context of the ever-increasing volume and variety of data that is being collected, but with complex challenges posed by data privacy, fairness and the high level of expertise required to analyze the data effectively. By illuminating the key characteristics of this technology, we’re providing a platform from which people can effect major change.”