Blueprint for Success: Strategic AI Deployment in Financial Services

Raghu Kulkarni is a Senior Vice President and the Chief Data Science Officer at Discover Financial Services. His primary responsibilities include leading scorecard model development teams and Machine Learning (ML) research. His team develops models for the entire life cycle of the customer spanning Acquisition, Portfolio, Collections, Fraud risk and AML. Raghu is passionate about AI/ML Research, with specific focus on ML Explainability and Fair Lending research. In 2023, he led the creation of Generative AI Modeling team with an emphasis on utilizing latest Large Language Models (LLMs’) to be used across the enterprise, especially for risk and governance.

Raghu also manages the company’s Analytics Centers in Shanghai and Chicago. He has been with Discover for more than 13 years and has had stints at HSBC and Barclays in credit risk analytics roles.

He holds a PhD in Applied Economics and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Texas Tech University.

Brent DeMar is VP of Decisioning Technology at Discover Financial Services. His primary responsibility is to oversee the engineering and product management groups that are bringing to market data science and decisioning solutions. He is seeing forth the development of Discover GenAI tech stack along with supporting all modeling and business rule lifecycle capabilities.

Prior to this, he managed Discover Data and BI platform group where he built out a next-gen data engineering platform ecosystem. He has also held application development, architecture, infrastructure operations, and senior engineering positions across a diverse set of technologies. Brent holds a BS in computer science from Purdue University and enjoys family, cooking, music, and New Orleans Saints football.

Arjun Ravi Kannan leads the data science/machine learning (ML) research function at Discover Financial Services. His team focuses on fundamental research in areas such as ML Explainability and Bias/Fair Lending research and has multiple papers (some published in top journals) and pending patents in these areas. His team also develops and explores the use of advanced ML algorithms such as Graphs, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Unsupervised Learning methods in financial services applications.

He has been with Discover for more than 9 years in progressive roles in both risk management and behavioral modeling. He holds a PhD (ABD) in Finance from the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.