Kareem Saleh
Fairplay CEO and Co-Founder
Kareem Saleh is the founder and CEO of FairPlay, the AI enablement company for financial services and insurance industries. FairPlay specializes in testing, tuning, and validating AI systems and agents—helping institutions deploy AI faster, more profitably, and in full compliance. Previously Kareem served as Executive Vice President at Zest.ai, where he led business development for the company’s machine learning-powered credit underwriting platform.
Prior to Zest.ai, Kareem served as an executive at SoftCard, a mobile payments startup that was acquired by Google. Kareem also served in the Obama Administration, first as Chief of Staff to the State Department’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, where he helped manage the 50-person team that negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement, then as Senior Advisor to the CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) where he helped direct the U.S. Government’s $30B portfolio of emerging market investments with responsibility for transaction teams in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
Kareem is a Forbes contributor and a frequent speaker on the application of AI to financial services. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and an honors graduate of the University of Chicago.
2026 Agenda Sessions
How are AI agents coming for lenders?
AI agents are poised to fundamentally reshape the lending landscape. Unlike traditional automation, these autonomous systems can analyze credit risk, process applications, adjust pricing, and manage customer relationships with minimal human oversight.
This session explores how banks and fintechs must adapt as AI agents transform everything from underwriting to collections and examines whether lenders are ready for a future where their customers might be AI agents too. We'll cut through the hype to focus on how innovative lenders can position themselves to lead in this brave new world.
Takeaways:
• Learn how AI agents differ from existing automation and why this distinction matters for lending operations.
• Discover which lending functions are most vulnerable to agent-driven disruption and which represent the biggest opportunity for efficiency gains and risk reduction.
• Explore how lenders can prepare for both deploying AI agents internally AND serving customers who use agents to shop for loans.
Tuesday 31 March 09:35 - 10:15 Lending
AI & Agentic Systems
Data & Personalization
Infrastructure & APIs
This session explores how banks and fintechs must adapt as AI agents transform everything from underwriting to collections and examines whether lenders are ready for a future where their customers might be AI agents too. We'll cut through the hype to focus on how innovative lenders can position themselves to lead in this brave new world.
Takeaways:
• Learn how AI agents differ from existing automation and why this distinction matters for lending operations.
• Discover which lending functions are most vulnerable to agent-driven disruption and which represent the biggest opportunity for efficiency gains and risk reduction.
• Explore how lenders can prepare for both deploying AI agents internally AND serving customers who use agents to shop for loans. Lending US/Pacific
