John Candido

Head of Data Science Zest Finance

John Candido is Director of Data Science at ZestFinance. Since joining the company as a data scientist himself in 2012, John has worked on all of the startup’s major underwriting machine learning models and partnerships, most notably working with companies like JD.com, Baidu and Ford Motor Credit in addition to many other domestic and international banks and lenders. John has also played a major role in creating the framework for the companies ZAML (Zest Automated Machine Learning) platform, which leverages the techniques and methodologies behind the companies experience in applying machine learning to the credit space, addressing model explainability concerns for business owners and regulatory considerations. Outside of ZestFinance, John has achieved the level of Competitions Master from the Google owned company Kaggle, for his stellar and consistent performance in real world machine learning competitions. He has also reached the rank of one of the top 100 data scientists in the world for his performances with Kaggle. John has an education in both finance and psychology research, holding a Bachelors degree from Hofstra University and a Masters Degree in Psychology from Chapman University.