DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION/
ONLY THE ADAPTIVE SURVIVE
― Leading a deep technology company in today’s modern, fast-paced, and ever-evolving business environment is both an exciting and challenging endeavor, however it’s still all about the people. by Martina King Chief Executive Officer Featurespace Pte Ltd
O ur product-market fit was achieved after considerable trial and error. At the time there were very few machine learning products available in any sector, other than the academic environment the term wasn’t widely expressed. Finding the ideal market to offer a new and improved approach with results better than what had gone before takes time. Once we were introduced to the payment sector and with their encouragement we found all the relevant elements for industry disruption. Our invention of Adaptive Behavioral Analytics achieves the greatest results on large, real-time /time series data where we are searching for anomalistic behaviors in vast normal or good behavior sets. We required an important problem to solve – a boardroom agenda item, with commercial relevance, a growing market and dissatisfaction with the incumbent technologies and most importantly to find a place where machine learning would be for the benefit of society; “machine learning for good”.
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Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point talks about the importance of Mavens in the change process. “Mavens are information specialists. They are the kind of people who are endlessly curious and adept at gathering and retaining information on a wide variety of (sometimes obscure) topics”. We identified and met with the payment industry’s fraud prevention Mavens, they understood our technology’s potential, we spoke the same language and we experimented together. Their requests were identical; to build technology better than the existing vendors, invest to maintain the lead and continue to treat us, your customers, with honesty and trust. And make sure your technology works! Our course was set and eight years later we are widely recognized as the world’s best technology for solving payment fraud and financial crime and enjoy some of the highest possible customer satisfaction scores.
Committing to an industry by promising to build the most effective mission critical technology meant we needed to create a workforce motivated to bring their ingenuitive best, every day. Creating the Right Environment for Ethical & Commercial Scientific Discovery Being part of the early adoption and launch of products and services available on the internet, Martina learnt that a duty of care to society is beholden on technology companies and technologists. In the race to bring new features during the early days of the internet, the goal to launch outstripped any governance. Governance procedures were not in place to consider the impact such technologies could have on users or society. She strongly believes in the importance of ethical decision-making when bringing new technologies to society.
Issue 91 / March 2023