Bernie Siskin, PhD

Bernie has been at the forefront of Fair Lending & financial justice thought leadership over four decades. Bernie co-founded BLDS and Solas.ai with the mission to advance policies, mathematical techniques, and algorithmic innovations geared towards responsibly expanding inclusive lending across Financial Institutions and FinTechs.

Bernie specializes in the application of statistics in law, particularly in analyzing data for statistical evidence of discrimination. He has provided expert testimony in Court for in more than 200 cases, many of which were precedent-setting in lending, housing, and insurance.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Siskin has advised Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and most major U.S. banks.

Bernie developed the industry-standard methods for searching for alternative credit models with less disparate impact while maintaining acceptable accuracy, which has been adopted by most major lenders in the United States.

He is the author of numerous articles and textbooks on statistics and quantitative techniques – particularly on the topic of inclusive credit finance:

• Siskin, B. et al., “Algorithmic Credit Scoring and FICO’s Role in Developing Accurate, Unbiased, and Fair Credit Scoring Models”, Consumer Law Quarterly Report, 2021.
• B. Siskin, "Comparing the Role of Statistics In Lending and Employment Cases," Fair Lending Analysis: A Compendium of Essays on the Use of Statistics, American Bankers Association, 1995.
• B. Siskin, "Discrimination Litigation: Behavioral, Quantitative, and Legal Perspectives”, Statistical Issues in Litigation, 2005.
• Siskin, B., Mansur, S. et al., “How Data Scientists Help Regulators and Banks Ensure Fairness when Implementing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Models.” Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York, NY. February 23 - 24, 2018.
• Siskin, B., et. al., “Proper Methods for Statistical Analysis of Promotions,” in Adverse Impact Analysis: Understanding Data, Statistics, and Risk, 2016.

Bernie holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania and has served as the Chairman of the Department of Statistics at Temple University.