Stephen Hicks, who led enterprise fairness risk oversight at a top-five U.S. bank, joins SolasAI’s Industry Advisory Board
SolasAI, the leader in innovative algorithmic fairness AI software, today announced that Stephen L. Hicks has joined its Industry Advisory Board. Hicks spent more than two decades managing regulatory risk as a senior vice president at two Wall Street banks, including the last 13 years at a top-five U.S. bank where he led enterprise fairness risk oversight for all credit products across the full credit lifecycle.
The appointment comes as SR 26-2, the model risk management guidance issued by the Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC, resets how banks are expected to govern their models. Rather than prescribing a fixed checklist, SR 26-2 requires institutions to construct, document, and defend their own standard of sound practice. The question examiners ask shifts from whether a bank followed the rules to whether its discipline is defensible on its own terms, a heavier burden that falls squarely on the teams accountable for fairness and model risk.
Read More on Fintech : Global FinTech Interview: AI and the future of fintech with Hugh Cumming, CTO, Vena
Hicks spent his career inside that burden. He led model monitoring, disparate impact testing, and regulatory examination management at enterprise scale – the exact functions SolasAI’s Beacon and Illumination products are built to support. His decision to affiliate with SolasAI reflects a gap he observed firsthand between the fairness risk that institutions are accountable for and the tooling available to manage it in practice.
“We’ve seen this time and again. When regulatory expectations are subjective – UDAAP, discrimination, CRA performance, and similar areas – banks must rely on a strong, defensible internal control framework to navigate the regulatory environment successfully,” Hicks said.
“Stephen spent his career solving the exact problem our customers face, at the scale they face it,” said Larry Bradley, co-founder and CEO, SolasAI. “SR 26-2 puts the responsibility for defining and defending sound practice on the institution. Having someone on our advisory board who carried that accountability at the highest level of the industry sharpens everything we build.”
Hicks’s appointment deepens SolasAI’s advisory bench precisely as SR 26-2 shifts the burden of demonstrating sound, defensible AI governance onto financial institutions themselves.
Catch more Fintech Insights : Global FinTech Innovations Are Transforming Banking into Continuous Financial Guidance
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
