AK Blog on Fintech

You can take any big company and sleep through their pages of code of ethics written by lawyers and read by none. The more interesting approach is to look at the discrepancy between stated ethics guide and what the company is actually doing. step 1. Standartised code of ethics is possible to look at here: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics and then some real life interesting cases you can take from this link: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics/case-studies one of the most typical breach of code of ethics is "dark UX" - using trics of UX to make User to do on the web page somethign that is not what they intednd to do, but that lead to some benefit of the Webpage owner. https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/using-the-code/case-dark-ux-patterns/ and the live cases you can get from this Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/darkpatterns and finally we arrived to the Ryanair sample, company that has Ethics code  https://investor.ryanair.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Ryanair-Holdings-...

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 A...

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 parameter...

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...

My experience with IT professionals in Estonia is coming from pure "business consumer" side: normally i have a business problem that needs resolving and IT is one of the tools, among many others, that can be used to resolve it. Therefore i will be outlining my view current level of IT professionals in Estonia from this angle. Most likely biased and limited with one person's experience, working with internal IT departments of several companies, plus several external IT development companies. But nonetheless practical experience. One of the strongest sides i see almost universally - is the no-nonsense approach: IT professionals clearly want to understand the business problem, not afraid to ask questions, and looking for very practical (efficient and fast) ways to solve the problem. To the point that this can be almost described as "growth hacking it". The waterfall approach, traditional for historical software companies in the past, is almost not used anymore....

CopyLEFT, distinguished from CopyRIGHT, is the practice of offering people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a work with the stipulation that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created later.[1] Copyleft software licenses are considered protective or reciprocal, as contrasted with permissive free-software licenses.[2] ( Wiki ) Essentially, Copyleft is a part of an umbrella licenses used for different ways to protect free distribution of authors’ work with several levels of protection and couple of restrictions, as Copyleft licence is a protective license, thus limiting some parameters of its use: prohibition of appropriation (cannot make the source code “closed”, it must remain open). requirement to distribute derivative work under the same license And from these restrictions we can see that the use of Copyleft, although is very noble and well-intended for the good of the public, has its own limitations. We take our knowledge from Wi...

Teema 6. Review and comments of Pirate Party proposals to Copyright laws. The source of the document is located here:  The Case For Copyright Reform (2012) Engstrom-Falkvinge.pdf The main proposals are outlined in the Chapter 2 of above document. I start with outlining my general approach to Pirate Party proposals: with most of them I do agree with in spirit (if not always to the letter). The progress of humanity was hampered on many (well documented) occasions by corporations. Corporations used existing Copyright laws to prevent innovations from being used by the public, due to the potential risk of damaging their revenues. Laws are created in the interest of the people However, not all approaches suggested by Pirate Party I can fully agree with, but we can review them one by one below. Moral rights unchanged “Credit is where credit due” - no arguments, authors suggest to leave as is and i fully agree. Free non-commercial sharing Positives are undeniable in usin...

Ruleset described by Virginia Shea makse a lot of practical sense. As the key point from where Internet have started - was to share expert knowledge. Years ago when living in London, we had an online forum for russian-speakers in the UK which started as the place where people with some experience in UK could share information and advice with people who recently arrived and did not know much. This was extremely useful source of quick advice, life-hacks, even psychological support for people in new environment. But something that started as simple place for support for local russian speakers, after a year had became a great place where a lot of smart people communicated daily, shared stories, opinions and established real life friendships. And the main reason why smart people with smart jobs and busy lives had spent some part of their time communicating on this internet platform was due to simple rules enforced by moderators: no swearing, no unpolite behavior, no “anonymous comme...

The report itself can be found on this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf Indeed the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen has a quite solid approach to this work and he brought quite wide aspects of society into his review. However i cannot help but notice that his approach lacks one very important aspect - realities and implications of those challenges to real life are left almost unattended. Philosopher writes for politicians, what sense of reality are you waiting for? From which of those two? All right, we are not in 2020, so let's have a look at what has changed since 2004. Himanen list following main global trends that will affect us in the next 20 years. 1. Increasing international tax competition 2. The new global division of labour 3. Population ageing 4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society 5. The second phase of the information society 6. The...

The subject for this week’s homework is the effect that one of the new media components has on its field. There are tons of published articles and gigabytes of text written on each of the most known areas of new media: chat rooms, social networks, blogs, wiki- effects. But all of these different New Medias  have one common subject - us, humans. What is the effect of New Media on human behavior, our thinking and addictions? Therefore i decided to look at this aspect mostly in this blog post. How our thinking is affected by new media and are we benefiting from positive effects of new media or suffering from its negative influences? And is it possible to have a balance between these two? Obviously, this post is based on my own experiences, preferences and observations. And while i will try to be objective for the sake of brevity i will limit my post to only three most popular categories of new media alliance: Wikipedia, YouTube and Social Networks. Positives: Wikipedia and si...

The topic of this week, is the early stage of the internet and two items from that era: one that is still in use or at least familiar to users and the other one that is completely dead. Back in nearly 90’ties, the word “internet” was still associated with “TTU lab” and weird sounds coming from dial-up modems available to a few lucky ones at home. From these long forgotten times comes something that is still alive today: MUME.  MUME is one of the early MUDs, Based on Tolkien’s books, my favorite game and the sole reason I speak and write English today. made me read all Talkien's books and find even those that were not translated and read them also. For those who are completely unaware of what MUDs are, it is a type of game that happens completely inside your head. The only things that you see on your computer screen are lines of text jumping at you:   *a Dwarf* is here, riding a mountain mule. Message like this brings in your head, an image of a ve...

Any major development in human’s technological development, and IT field is certainly major, cannot be taken in isolation from changes in a society. For centuries, breakthroughs in technology used by humans were driven by military needs or with military as a tool for advancing trade routes. Need to produce more and better quality swords have driven material science and metallurgy advances, thus humans moved from Bronse age to Iron age. Desire to dominate on sea routes, led to discovery of America’s (a.k.a. “West Indies”) in 1493 and “magnetic declination” by Christopher Columbus in the same journey. Geography, Astronomy, maths advanced all in one journey. Development of Enigma code machine by German engineer Arthur Scherbius and subsequent efforts by Polish and British mathematicians and cryptographers have played significant role in military efforts on the Western Front of WW2. Even the birth of internet would be severely delayed if not for the discoveries made during t...