Unified Intelligence® System: A concept article
ABSTRACT
A preliminary look into a potential solution for pragmatic and sustainable financial inclusion without data privacy issues
What?
Unified Intelligence® is a system of arriving at a collective and consolidated agreement to answer a real-world problem - pragmatic and sustainable financial inclusion without sacrificing personal's privacy.
This process or method encompasses multiple disciplines and technologies ranging from, but not limited to, big data, federated learning, quantitative finance, qualitative analytics, cybersecurity, and regulatory.
Why?
One-third of the world’s population does not have access to financial aids or is financially excluded. While many nations have mandated financial inclusion as a national agenda, and with the emergence of many fintech lenders, the progress can be significantly improved. There are numerous reasons for the lack of progress:
1. The lack of reliable credit assessment data on the financially excluded or thin file causes the financial institutions’ inertia to grant credit. Unlike the bankable population, almost all of the financially excluded do not have any form of credit history, or they are practically invisible in the traditional credit bureaus or financial institutions.
2. The heightening data privacy regulations (European GDPR, PDPA, et al.) across the globe prevented or hindered the use of alternative and government agency data (social media, Telco, utilities, Tax, eCommerce, ride-hailing, et al) to generate an alternative and reliable credit score.
3. The low penetration or adoption of smartphones and 4g or 5g networks in the most remote or rural areas is prevalent in most developing countries. This causes blind spots or roadblocks incapacitating the provision of digital financial services and government aid.
4. The lack of cross-government agency sharing of information relating to an individual and small business behavioral and financial profile, further exacerbate the challenges.
How?
The Unified Intelligence® system that is described here embodies some of the well- established and nascent and evolving technologies, such as federated learning at scale.
Unified Intelligence® system does not seek to address all the challenges to pragmatic and sustainable financial inclusion, as some of the challenges require fundamental legislative changes and support from the government.
The primary building blocks of the Unified Intelligence® system are:
1. A central computation and orchestration platform termed as Unified intelligence® hub. The purpose is to receive the updates of parameters and weight (not the data) from the participating actors such as personal smartphones, government databases, and private enterprise database to train the global models.
2. A robust credit score model to survive conditions such as low network bandwidth and the absence of smartphones due to low penetration in developing countries.
3. Secure encryption and security mechanisms - prevent security breaches and breach of trust.
4. An equitable monetization scheme to incentivize the participation of the actors to provide updates of the parameters.
There are still many challenges in terms of technological, business, and governmental to be addressed before this system can be commercially available. I believe the Unified Intelligence® System will eradicate information asymmetry, circumventing data privacy issues, and accelerate the pace of financial inclusion.