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Recently, a tweet caused a big kerfuffle when Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson tweeted that his credit limit for the new Apple Card was 20 times that of his wife’s, even though she has the higher credit score. All of a sudden the news picked up stories on gender bias, claiming the credit card's issuer, Goldman Sachs, is giving women far lower credit limits with the new Apple Card, even if they share assets and accounts with their spouse.

But it's impossible to know if the Apple Card — or any other credit card — discriminates against women, because creditworthiness algorithms are notoriously opaque. Credit scores are only one factor in determining credit worthiness, so it’s hard to jump to conclusions.

But if the future is more technology around B2B lending, just how concerned should we be that models built on AI may not be as good as one might think? If we are to believe the capabilities of AI, and I do, then through self-learning mechanisms like self-driving cars, the intelligence should get better with more experience.

But humans design software, and humans have biases. Some examples include:

During the Lendit Fintech USA conference that I spoke at last week on digital supply chain finance lending, the attendees biggest interest was in two […]

Captive B2B Marketplace lenders look to mine data to finance sellers   The traditional Captive Finance companies – such as Deere Capital, CAT Financial, or GE Capital helped finance […]

In some ways it feels like 1999 all over again in the fintech B2B lending world. It seems there is no shortage of new consumer […]

I continue to believe there are some great innovators out there around marketplace lending and crowdfunding sources for business but most of these companies like […]

Alternative Finance vendors can manufacture assets that can (potentially?) be sold to third parties.  I tend to look at this space as both buyer-focused and […]

For the majority of Alternative Finance B2B providers, their information on size, volumes, etc. is kept private, no different than trying to find the payment […]

When we think small business lending, we are usually talking loans less than $250,000.   Many non bank fintech companies have made forays into this space […]

The Federal Reserve Bank is very interested in new online lending platforms targeting small business to the point they gathered small businesses together in an […]

The Treasury Department is deciding how to classify and categorize the new marketplace lending industry. People use the word “marketplace or p2p lending” just as […]

Scaling Institutional Investment in Trade Receivables requires creating Infrastructure and that includes Custodians (and not the janitorial kind). There are two big areas of third […]

Supply chain finance is all the buzz these days by all vendors wanting to add that killer finance app to their solution. Certainly, networks, big […]