Transforming financial institutions with automated, end-to-end digital decisioning, Corridor Platforms bridges AI innovation and compliance for real-time success.
Could you start by telling us about your journey and what led you to create Corridor Platforms?
I have spent most of my career consulting or working in financial services firms. Improving decisioning and analytical capabilities to keep up with the latest innovations is something all firms struggle to do, especially regulated entities like banks. The existing decision management workflow involves many manual handoffs between data teams, modeling teams, strategy implementers, and governance groups leading to long lead times in developing, testing, and implementing any change in decisioning logic. Additionally, financial institutions (FIs) building big data and machine learning capabilities face one common issue: the more sophisticated the data, models, and strategies are, the longer it takes to go through governance and testing procedures for implementation in production. And the pace of change in big data, AI and now Gen AI is so fast that most financial institutions are struggling to keep up with agile competition.
To address this, we launched Corridor Platforms with a team of seasoned risk professionals. Our goal was to develop end-to-end digital decisioning capabilities that allowed regulated entities to innovate using cutting-edge AI and big data technologies on a highly automated and governed platform. By connecting Data, Modeling, and Decision Strategy workbenches, we are enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements and then allowing them to quickly and seamlessly reap the benefit in production.
Another driving factor behind building Corridor was the slow pace at which FIs iterated on analytics and the inefficiencies they faced in deploying them to production. Traditionally, changing strategies and decisions has been a slow, manual process, taking weeks to months. In the digital age, where customers expect instant gratification and have multiple choices, it’s now an imperative for FIs to elevate their analytical sophistication and offer real-time decisioning to grow and sustain customer relationships. Our platform enables this by providing end-to-end connectivity, automating and compressing the change management lifecycle from weeks to hours. Our goal is to help FIs compete against new-age competitors and win the best customers in the digital era.
What are some of the core problems in decision workflow governance and automation that Corridor Platforms is designed to solve?
We are a decisioning workflow automation bench built on a foundation of data governance to help regulated companies leapfrog legacy AI decisioning processes and technologies to a NextGen Digital Decisioning platform needed to win in the age of digital transformation.
The platform has two distinct and connected modules that solve the core problems FIs currently face:
Data and Model Management – Introducing new and alternate sources of data, ensuring permissible usage across the decisioning cycle, and ensuring that the models built are compliant with fair lending and other regulations is a large challenge at most regulated institutions. In our experience, the underlying core issue that solves this challenge is connecting the Data, Modeling, and Business Strategy workbenches (teams and their tools). Eliminating manual handoffs reduces operational inefficiencies, creates transparency across the decision lifecycle, and provides auditability that allows for enhanced controls. Corridor achieves this connectivity and creates a single source of truth for all analytics and decisions, enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements without disruption.
Strategy Automation – Changing strategies and decisions, in most organizations, is a slow manual process resulting in a lag of weeks to months. Strategies are evaluated, sent for approvals, programmed by technology, and tested before putting into production. In the age of digital offerings, where consumers are able to compare alternative offerings simultaneously, every hour is material as one reacts to changes in competitive or economic conditions. We have created end-to-end connectivity that enables automation and compresses the change management lifecycle into hours rather than weeks/months. A core theme of the platform is ensuring FIs maintain the highest regulatory standards even while moving to real-time decisioning. Our goal is to help clients manage and win against traditional and new-age competition, especially through challenging economic cycles.
Another critical design focus is to ensure that the platform is plug-and-play and that it integrates quickly through APIs with legacy infrastructure, making time to market and impact a clear differentiator. Corridor is highly modular and recognizes that most banks have built some components of a connected decisioning life cycle. We integrate with current components to fill in the gaps and have implemented the software at startups as well as highly sophisticated banks.
Given your extensive background at American Express, particularly with Big Data and Machine Learning, how do these experiences influence the technological direction of Corridor Platforms?
American Express has always been one of the leaders in financial services driving innovation and change to serve its customer base with the highest standards. It was also one of the first movers to adopt big data and machine learning in banking. The experience and learnings gained by driving innovation in analytics at Amex and before that as a consultant serving other leading banks are foundational in helping design a Next-Gen decisioning platform. The founding team of Corridor had the benefit of rethinking the entire process and designing from scratch a decisioning and governance automation platform based on our practical experience in understanding all the pain points that need to be addressed to enable advanced decisioning in regulated entities.
What sets Corridor Platforms apart from other solutions in the market when it comes to helping financial institutions innovate while maintaining governance standards?
Our platform operates as an open, flexible, and modular system. Unlike closed-off analytical products that restrict innovation to their specific toolkits and coding languages, we enable you to innovate using various ML libraries and feature engineering while seamlessly integrating into our interconnected decision management rail. Our design principle ensures easy integration and interchangeability of different decision components, so that you can innovate within these individual components while orchestrating the entire process with standardized automation on the platform.
Additionally, we enable FIs to build and own their core in-house capability instead of just renting it for long-term value, and we span across the entire customer lifecycle, be it origination, marketing, cross-selling, or loss management.
The other key differentiators of the platform can be described in four parts:
a. End-to-end Digital Decisioning lifecycle solution: Provides an end-to-end decisioning lifecycle solution that ‘strings the pearls’ for decision objects of data, feature, model and strategies/rules in a controlled interconnected shared digital workbench.
b. System of record for Analytics: The analytical decisioning platform from Corridor becomes the ‘single source of truth’ for ALL analytics at a regulated firm including past versions of analytics use cases which were approved and locked on the platform for post-production scrutiny by internal compliance teams or external regulators. While analytical systems can come and go, the system of record like Corridor memorializes these decision artifacts for review/investigation post-fact in perpetuity.
c. Systematic governance & compliance: The platform integrates systematic governance and standardized compliance at the ‘source’ when objects are created versus downstream where they are used. This paradigm of ‘Left Shift Decisioning’ where compliance happens upstream and allows downstream decisioning to be approved quicker with less surprise and enables speed with safety.
d. One click-to-production: We are one of the only firms where AI-powered decision artifacts move from analytical environment to production post compliance and approval in ‘one-click’ with no recoding. This reduces the time-to-market, ensures strict control of what decisions are put into production, and allows for post-decision regulatory oversight (e.g., a regulator inquiring, “Why was that applicant rejected four years ago?”).
Could you share an example of how Corridor Platforms has helped a financial institution optimize its decisions in real-time?
A US G-SIB bank was looking for ways to reduce the time and resources required to develop and deploy models in its credit card business. As a highly regulated entity, a priority for the client was to increase speed to market while demonstrating to internal stakeholders and regulators that model, operational, and compliance risk remained the same or ideally decreased. The client engaged Corridor Platforms to perform a rapid diagnostic pilot, focusing on the capabilities of data provisioning, model development, model validation, and deployment to production.
Use of Corridor Platforms reduced model development, governance, and deployment timelines by 30% to 40%. The platform significantly enhanced governance and controls with standardized interfaces, automation of workflows, and greater transparency to reduce friction and inefficiencies. In addition, the team identified significant transformational opportunities by moving manual processes to the platform including model performance tracking and alerts, ongoing approval management, etc.
With the rapid advancement of AI and big data technologies, how do you ensure that Corridor Platforms stays ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and effectiveness?
Corridor Platforms is highly modular and enables FIs to slot in or slot out their decision components with the latest technology without disrupting their existing workflows – enabling them to always stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation.
Corridor continuously evaluates new and cutting-edge trends in AI/Gen AI algorithms being used in new use cases and how the platform adopts or integrates into it, ensuring our technology is always ‘Current’ for our clients.
In addition, we have launched a starter validation kit called Gen Guard X (Project GGX) in partnership with Oliver Wyman where we have lifted and shifted the product to enable risk management of Gen AI pipelines. Project GGX enables robust governance and provides a centralized and highly integrated platform for evaluating and managing risk at every point of your GenAI application pipeline in a tightly controlled & governed environment.
How does your team’s experience with managing multi-billion-dollar lending portfolios contribute to the development and functionality of Corridor Platforms?
Corridor is founded by industry practitioners and experts who have honed their expertise by working in the industry for more than three decades.
Our technology solves the practical problems faced by companies regularly by combining the knowledge of industry experts and the design and technical skills of a highly skilled and current technology bench. We have built a system that we felt we would have benefited from tremendously when we were on the business side.
What were some of the significant challenges you encountered while building Corridor Platforms, and how did you overcome them?
Starting a business from scratch has its many challenges. One of our main obstacles was creating a team that could blend the experience of industry practitioners with a talented younger cohort skilled in the latest tech and analytical advancements to make our vision into reality. We have kept the company lean with minimal layers to ensure efficient problem-solving and we are able to create and maintain a next-gen platform that is evolving rapidly with new innovations in data and analytics. Our aim is to always stay ahead of the curve for our clients so that they can experiment and deploy the latest advancements in decisioning analytics, AI and GenAI.
As someone with a deep background in risk management, how do you see the future of risk management evolving, and how is Corridor Platforms positioned to address these changes?
Risk Management has evolved significantly in the past years, transitioning from a back-end support function to a key enabler allowing banks to innovate and advance their products and services to serve their customer base with excellence. In my view, this trend will continue as data analytics-driven decisioning becomes prevalent across all industries, especially in banking. From marketing, underwriting to customer cross-selling, all functions are now utilizing the latest innovations in Artificial Intelligence and predictive analytics to improve their products and services. With these advancements comes the responsibility to govern data usage, control systematic bias, ensure proper monitoring for accuracy and compliance – all functions which rely on risk management expertise.
What are your long-term visions for Corridor Platforms? Are there any exciting developments or expansions on the horizon that you can share with us?
We aim to be known as the best-in-class decision management platform for the build, evaluate, govern and implement cycle across large and mid-market FIs. We are also rapidly expanding our RiskDecisioning.ai offering in the mid-market segment. Our new Build-Operate-Transfer offering is targeted at smaller banks and credit unions. This turnkey solution not only equips them with the platform and capabilities to quickly become best-in-class but also includes dedicated consulting teams that can help set up, deliver benefits and then train the banks to take over tasks to ensure self-sufficiency.
To remain at the forefront of innovation, Corridor Platforms and Oliver Wyman recently launched Project GGX, a generative AI initiative focused on safely deploying GenAI in large, regulated enterprises and safeguarding against unintended LLM risks. Combining Oliver Wyman’s risk management expertise with Corridor’s advanced technology, the project aims to test, measure, and monitor the novel risks associated with GenAI.
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