André Monteiro

Founder and CTO, Acordo Certo

Supernova Award Category: 

AI and Augmented Humanity

The Organization: 

Acordo Certo was established in 2015 with a mission to transform the debt industry by helping people reduce debt and get back on their feet. The Acordo Certo debt negotiation marketplace helps thousands of people track, negotiate, and pay their debts easily, with no hassle. Acordo Certo believes that automation and technology provide debtors with a faster, cheaper, and more transparent process. The company is disrupting an outdated system by building a digital environment that addresses Brazilian customers’ needs with no paperwork or inefficient call centers.  

 

In addition, creditors can recover debt in a more seamless and predictable way. Acordo Certo started using AI and machine learning to build and deploy predictive and scored models. 

 

The Problem: 

Consumer debt was rising in Brazil, and it was becoming challenging for both consumers and debtors to find solutions. The target market of debtors and the ensuing volume of data to be analyzed were both large and therefore challenging. Acordo Certo had a small team of data scientists who were using traditional methods to collect and analyze data, as well as to build and deploy predictive and scored models. However, due to the large database of customers, there was a need to increase the agility of model development and accuracy, as well as improve overall trust in AI by making the results of machine learning algorithms transparent to business partners such as retailers and banks.

The Solution: 

H2O Driverless AI empowered the small team of data scientists at Acordo Certo to create new models and scores in a much faster and accurate way with automatic feature engineering and then review the results with machine learning interpretability. The key use cases for Acordo Certo are: increasing customer propensity to sign up, debt and lead scoring, and credit risk scoring.

The Results: 

AI and machine learning have allowed Acordo Certo to better focus on consumer signals about changes in income and interest in repaying debt. The results are making it easier for Acordo Certo to expand its business partnerships with retail and banking firms who want to recoup outstanding consumer debt. Placing technology and machine learning at the center of their approach to the consumer debt market has put Acordo Certo in the unique position of observing consumer signals about changes in income and interest in repaying debt before creditors or lenders. Ultimately, Acordo Certo’s innovative approach is to help consumers, creditors, and lenders alike.

 

 

Metrics: 

With 3.6M Brazilians on the platform and by using H2O Driverless AI, Acordo Certo was able to

1. Retire over $10M/month

2. Reduce model development time by 70 percent

3. Improve model accuracy to nearly 80 percent

 

The Technology: 

H2O Driverless AI with data connectors such as S3 and bigquery

H2O Open Source

AWS (Deploying scored models on Lambda)

Jupyter Notebooks to make an exploratory analysis of pipeline data

Disruptive Factor: 

Machine learning has become central to Acordo Certo’s business strategy and H2O Driverless AI plays a major role in the company’s approach. H2O Driverless AI is making it faster, cheaper, and easier to score debt to reduce repayment and default risk. AI-powered personalized financial advice from Acordo Certo helps both consumers and creditors win.

Shining Moment: 

Acordo Certo can better help people achieve their financial goals by reducing their debt. Driverless AI proved not only easy to use, but also made it easy to get results. The company reduced the time to build and deploy models from about one week to a few days—a massive improvement. They also improved the predictive accuracy of the repayment model to over 76 percent. Consumers and creditors alike are reaping the benefits of Acordo Certo’s unique AI-driven debt scoring models.

About Acordo Certo

Acordo Certo is Brazil’s largest online debt payment and re-negotiation platform. Based in São Paulo, the company was established in 2015 with a mission to transform the debt industry by helping people reduce debt and help creditors collect in a more seamless and predictable way.