AK Blog on Fintech

for the topic of this week i will describe risks and mitigation suggestions for one of the Fintech practices : P2P lending platforms. in short P2P (or Peer-to-peer) lending "is the practice of lending money to individuals or businesses through online services that match lenders with borrowers. Peer-to-peer lending companies often offer their services online, and attempt to operate with lower overhead and provide their services more cheaply than traditional financial institutions. As a result, lenders can earn higher returns compared to savings and investment products offered by banks, while borrowers can borrow money at lower interest rates ... There is the risk of the borrower defaulting on the loans taken out from peer-lending websites." Wiki Risks associated with this novel way of investing are obvious and numerous: - in 2018 - collapse of hundreds P2P lending platforms in China - Link - in 2019 and 2020 - closer to home - following platform collapsed in Europe (and

ML - Machine Learning AI - Artifical Intelligence Number of people with communication disabilities in the world counts in millions. A bit more precisely it could be calculated as 364 million people in the world, or 4.8% of the total world population. Number of people with hearing disabilities in the world could be roughly calculated as 266 million people. Of course not everyone of these millions of people have an access to YouTube or speak major languages, but roughly a quarter of worlds population has access. Therefore, it can be calculated that quarter of 364 million people and quarter of 266 million people, 91 million and 66 million people in the world might have benefited from one of support solutions introduced by YouTube/Google a few years ago. Auto-Captioning. Launched in 2009 this is not the most innovative solution by now, but easily one of the most widely used, and unquestionably have made lives of many many millions of people with hearing problems bit easier. One

Practical task again. I like it and will analyze a Loan application form for new customers from  Estonian Fintech company issuing consumer loans to private persons in Estonia: BigBank Main principles of usability according to Jakob Nielsen (renown Danish web usability consultant) are: Learnability - How quickly does the user learn the main functions when using the object for the first time? Efficiency - how quickly can the user take the necessary actions once the use of the object has been learned? Memorability - how quickly can the user recall the necessary skills if the object has not been used for some time? Errors (actually fault tolerance) - How many errors does the user make when using the object, how serious are they and how difficult is it to correct them? Satisfaction - how pleasant is the user experience? Usefulness - does the object do what is needed? Loan application forms, in a nutshell, have the purpose to collect enough verifiable information about the Appli

Software development project  Creating an analytics report according to business requirements, specifically:  Dialed outbound telephone numbers  for Customer Service agents and Number of successful conversations with customers. Following attributes for software development  project are present here: Business has a problem that can be resolved  by piece of software code Product owner (analytics department head) splits the business problem into series of tasks that his development team can work on Developers team:   Developers will create an API from telephony supplier;  Data Engineers - will extract required variables from raw data sent from telephony supplier via API PowerBI analytics will use the date to create reports in PowerBI tool for business to verify report and if all is correct -> to solve business problem with this report Step 1.  Business (me) creates a JIRA task with business problem description and parameters for the reporting that I needs to see: dat

The main text of the Article by Eric S. Raymond "Hacker-HOWTO" is located here Short attention spans of readers and business email etiquette rules (not so very surprising coincidence here, eh?) force us to put a key takeaway in the first paragraph of any text. So, here is my takeaway: What Eric S Raymond describes in his Hacker-HOWTO article is: no less, a step by step guide how to become and continue to be a decent human being. You have to be skilled and competent, you can't show-off, you really should not think too highly of yourself until your peers will recognize your qualities. But most interesting observation, is that a path to become a good, decent person, or a good HACKER - is a SELF-TAUGHT exercise. And this is a very interesting thought that I stumbled upon, while reading this article. Was Eric S. Raymond's aim really to write a guide on how to become a "hacker"? Or, rather, considering the level of immaturity of Frequently Asked Questions

For this week's topics i will take two well known IT bosses from the same company: Microsoft. Steve Ballmer who was CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014 and Satya Nadella who is current CEO since 2014. While don't have the privilege to know them personally, will base my blog post on their public image and corresponding wiki articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella You cannot be appointed as a CEO of the world's leading IT company without being an lvl80 in pretty much all management traits and styles: - be leader, when required to drive the team forward, be a coach to get the whole team to pull as one, be drive agent is needed constantly when pressured by developing technologies. So undoubtedly both Ballmer and Nadella have excelled in using all management styles at once. But nonetheless they also have their own unique and favorite styles. Ballmer Charismatic and energetic (even to the point of needing a doctor