Christiaan Walt

Christiaan van der Walt holds a PhD with specialisation in machine learning and has 19 years experience in the development of novel artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. He has established and led a number of machine learning and data science competencies in the financial services industry and work performed by him and his teams in artificial intelligence has been featured in Forbes and has been awarded with a number of international prizes and patents. Christiaan is currently the Head of Advanced Analytics at Momentum (a South African listed financial services group with a market capitalization of 1.5 Billion USD) where he is responsible for establishing and leading a data science competency to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning across all aspects of the business and to assist with disruptive innovation. Prior to Momentum, Christiaan was the Chief Data Scientist / Officer and CTO of the MyBucks group where he established the MyBucks AI Innovation Lab and lead the conceptualisation, architecture, prototype development, testing and deployment of machine learning products into production for the MyBucks group across 14 operating countries. The AI team consisted of 10 data scientists and software engineers. The MyBucks AI and innovation lab successfully developed core AI products for the MyBucks group, including automated credit scoring, automated fraud detection, prediction of client payment behaviour, question answering systems, automated bank statement analysis, prediction of loan uptake etc. Prior to MyBucks, Christiaan technically led numerous machine learning teams and projects within the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) that focused on the research and development of novel machine learning algorithms and the application of machine learning algorithms to solve real-world machine learning tasks. During th