Deserve Leverages H2O.ai to Innovate Credit for Underserved Populations

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 14, 2019 — H2O.ai, the open source leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, is proud to highlight a continued working relationship with Deserve, the company helping the next generation of credit owners to gain financial independence through fair access to credit products. H2O.ai’s automatic machine learning platform, H2O Driverless AI, provides machine learning capabilities as one aspect of the unique process Deserve created to determine characteristics and indicators of creditworthiness, such as financial health and habits.

“Most students don’t have a credit history, so Deserve measures their credit potential, not just the associated risk,” said Kalpesh Kapadia, CEO and Founder, Deserve. “By using H2O Driverless AI for automatic machine learning, we are able to more quickly deploy our proprietary algorithms that allow us to provide credit to students and the underserved. H2O.ai helps us to save considerable time and scale quickly even with a smaller data science team,” he added. “We are pleased to have H2O.ai onboard as a partner, and contributing to our mission of enabling a new generation to successfully begin their credit journey.”

Students in over 2,400 universities benefit from this new and modern approach to credit scoring, as Deserve seeks to serve the estimated 20 million college students in the US.

Democratizing Credit
To achieve its mission of providing fair access to credit to deserving but underserved populations, Deserve has created more equitable credit products, with the goal of also leading young adults to financial independence. These products serve college students and young adults who otherwise would be ineligible to obtain credit under a traditional credit-scoring system. Deserve looks at an applicant’s full financial picture, considering factors like how they manage money, along with records of on-time payments, to predict future credit potential. Last year, Deserve added a mobile financial management app with financial education tools and videos as well as an incentives program featuring products and services from Amazon, Apple, Priority Pass, and MasterCard, among others.

Automating Data Science Workflows
“Deserve is helping the next generation of credit owners gain financial independence with H2O Machine Learning and AI. We are excited that with H2O Driverless AI, Deserve is not only using more factors and deploying fast accurate scores but also relying on explainable machine learning they can trust,” said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai. “Credit scoring and lending in the sub-prime has been transformed with H2O Driverless AI. H2O.ai’s innovation is leading the democratization of AI and with our deep partnerships in the space democratizing credit and expanding access to the deserving in need.”

H2O Driverless AI empowers data scientists, such as those at Deserve, to work on projects faster and more efficiently through automatic machine learning and state-of-the-art computing power. Deserve’s VP of Data Sciences, Yan Yang agrees, adding, “H2O speeds up our iteration cycles so our team can focus on the core tasks: problem formulation, model design and insight interpretation.”

With Driverless AI, tasks that typically take months, are completed in just minutes or hours. This is accomplished by delivering automatic feature engineering, model validation, model tuning, model selection and deployment, machine learning interpretability, time-series, NLP and automatic pipeline generation for model scoring. H2O Driverless AI’s versatility makes it a powerful data science platform that easily addresses the needs of a variety of use cases for every enterprise in every industry.

To learn more about Deserve and its award-winning credit card products for those new to credit, visit www.deserve.com. For more information about how H2O.ai is driving an AI transformation for businesses with intelligence, visit www.h2o.ai.

About H2O.ai
H2O.ai is an open source leader in AI with a mission to democratize AI for everyone. H2O.ai is transforming the use of AI with software with its category-creating visionary open source machine learning platform, H2O. More than 18,000 companies use open-source H2O in mission-critical use cases for Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail, Telco, Sales and Marketing. H2O Driverless AI uses AI to do AI in order to provide an easier, faster and effective means of implementing data science. H2O.ai partners with leading technology companies such as NVIDIA, IBM, Intel, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and is proud of its growing customer base which includes Progressive Insurance, Walgreens and MarketAxess.

About Deserve®
Deserve uses machine learning and alternative data to provide millennials and Gen Z’s  fair access to credit products and the tools to achieve financial independence. The Deserve Edu Mastercard is the recipient of The Best Student Credit Card by both Money® Magazine and NerdWallet®. Deserve also offers a highly scalable and customizable Card as a Service (CaaS) platform for potential partners to launch private label and co-branded credit cards. Deserve is a venture-backed fintech startup whose investors include Accel, Pelion Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures, Mission Holdings, Alumni Venture Group, Sparklabs Ventures, Fenway Summer Ventures and GDP Venture. Deserve was recently named one of Fast Company’s 2019 Most Innovative Companies in the AI category, and one of American Banker’s 50 Best Fintechs to Work For). Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Deserve is a registered trademark of Deserve, Inc. All rights reserved. Deserve cards are issued by Celtic bank, a Utah-Chartered Industrial Bank, Member FDIC.

Media Contacts:

H2O.ai

Amber Winans
press@h2o.ai
510-984-1526

Deserve

Meg MacDougal
meg@calibercorporate.com