In this episode of the LendAPI Partner Podcast, host Timothy Li, Founder & CEO of LendAPI, sits down with Carla Canino, Founder & CEO of Kindlee (Techstars '24), to explore the intersection of responsible AI, financial inclusion, and the future of fair lending. Carla brings over 15 years of experience across global payments, financial services product strategy, and entrepreneurship — from her time as Global Payment Strategy Lead at Blizzard Entertainment to co-authoring inclusion standards with the Federal Reserve and W3C. Today, she is building Kindlee, the first AI fairness intelligence platform for regulated financial institutions, helping lenders detect bias, improve model accuracy, and meet EU AI Act compliance — while unlocking billions in untapped revenue.
What You’ll Learn:
Why AI bias in lending is costing the industry an estimated $443 billion annually — and how the majority of affected consumers are actually creditworthy customers being misclassified
How Kindlee's Kindlee Conversational Trust Index (KCTI) provides the first composite trust score for AI performance across vulnerable populations — with zero PII exposure and zero integration burden
Why 65% of loan declines may involve creditworthy customers misclassified by biased AI models, and what lenders can do about it right now
The real business case for inclusive AI: a documented 1,578% ROI on remediation over three years, and why fairness is a competitive advantage — not just a compliance checkbox
How the EU AI Act's August 2026 deadline is creating urgency for financial institutions to audit their AI systems for high-risk use cases
Carla's journey from payments expert at Activision Blizzard to solo founder — and the personal experiences as a disabled immigrant that exposed systemic weaknesses in financial systems and inspired Kindlee
Practical advice for any fintech or lender looking to build AI that is explainable, unbiased, accessible, and growth-focused
About New Market Growth
Kindlee is an AI fairness intelligence platform backed by Techstars and J.P. Morgan, purpose-built for regulated financial institutions navigating the EU AI Act and European Accessibility Act. Founded by Carla Canino, Kindlee helps banks, fintechs, and lenders detect bias and operational friction in their deployed AI — including conversational AI, credit decisioning, and KYC systems — and provides a direct path to remediation. Their proprietary KCTI benchmark has audited nine of Europe's largest financial institutions, revealing that 82.7% of AI interactions with disabled, elderly, and immigrant customers result in severe or critical failures. Kindlee makes fairness measurable, profitable, and easy to adopt — without touching a single line of PII. Learn more at www.kindlee.ai.
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