The Secret Life of Models in Banking with Ximena Zambrano

On October 30th, 2025, Ximena Zambrano, Consumer Model Development and Operations Executive at Bank of America, presented her seminar “The Secret Life of Models in Banking” at UNC Charlotte as part of the Center for TAIMing AI’s seminar series.

In this seminar, Zambrano explained how financial institutions rely on machine learning and statistical models for decisions like credit scoring, fraud detection, and stress testing, and why understanding model failure is just as important as model performance. Using real examples from her career, she showed how strong models protect financial stability, while weak or poorly governed models create consumer and regulatory risk. She also outlined common issues such as bias, data drift, and misaligned objectives, and stressed that model risk management is a foundation for safe and responsible innovation. The talk concluded with practical risk-mitigation strategies and a brief look at new governance challenges introduced by generative AI.

A copy of the presentation slides can be accessed here.

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