About Max Bist

Explainable ML for banking professionals

Most machine learning courses treat banking as an afterthought. This platform was built the other way around - starting from the regulatory and risk realities that analysts and model validators face daily.

Founded in 2017, Max Bist runs live webinars where participants work through real credit scoring and fraud detection scenarios, not toy datasets. Each session focuses on a specific interpretability technique - SHAP values, LIME, partial dependence plots - and connects it directly to what auditors and regulators expect to see in model documentation. The format is deliberately online so that participants from Centurion and surrounding areas can attend without rearranging their working day around travel.

Practitioners who attend leave with concrete methods they can apply to models already in production, not just theoretical frameworks to explore later.

241 participants rated their experience

4.8 average rating out of 5

38+ live webinar sessions delivered

The people behind the sessions

Each instructor brings direct experience from banking or financial technology - not just academic familiarity with the subject. That distinction shapes how sessions are structured and what gets prioritised.

Tarquin Osei

Lead Instructor, Explainable ML

Tarquin spent eight years as a model risk analyst at two South African retail banks before moving into education. His sessions on SHAP-based model documentation are grounded in what validation teams actually request during internal audits - not what textbooks suggest they should request. He structures each webinar around a specific failure mode participants might encounter in practice.

SHAP Model Risk Credit Scoring

"Regulators do not ask whether your model is accurate. They ask whether someone can explain why it made a specific decision about a specific customer. That is a different question entirely, and it requires a different set of tools."

- Tarquin Osei, Lead Instructor

Liesel Vantonder

Curriculum Designer

Liesel designs the session sequences and case materials. Her background in instructional design for technical audiences means the progression from concept to application is deliberate - each session builds on the previous one without assuming participants remember everything. She also handles the feedback loop, reviewing post-session responses and adjusting future content based on what participants found unclear.

Curriculum Case Design

Prashant Naidoo

Banking Risk Specialist

Prashant contributes the regulatory context that makes interpretability techniques practically relevant. He tracks changes in SARB guidance and Basel III model governance expectations, and flags where the technical content needs to align with current compliance requirements. His involvement keeps the material from drifting into pure data science territory disconnected from the banking environment.

Basel III SARB Compliance

What each session is built around

Sessions are not recorded lectures adapted for live delivery. Each webinar is built as an interactive event - participants submit questions in advance, work through a shared dataset during the session, and leave with annotated code and documentation templates they can use immediately.

Pre-session dataset distributed 48 hours ahead 01
Live model walkthrough with SHAP or LIME applied 02
Regulatory documentation exercise in session 03
Q&A with case-specific follow-up answers 04