Category: Financial Crimes Detection

Privacy Technologies for Financial Intelligence

August 20, 2024

It took a little while to write, but hopefully the following survey paper by Yang Li, Thilina Ranbaduge and yours truly can help demystify financial intelligence and privacy technologies for practitioners and technologists alike. The focus is on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, but the opportunity set is much broader. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09935 Here’s the abstract of … More Privacy Technologies for Financial Intelligence

FinTracer and Friends

June 25, 2023

About 5 years ago, Tania Churchill and I assembled a team of researchers and engineers across AUSTRAC and ANU to work on privacy technologies for detecting criminal activities across the financial system, funded by the Fintel Alliance Expansion budget measure, the Investigative Analytics NPP (led by CSIRO’s Data61), and an ANU Translational Fellowship. The overall … More FinTracer and Friends

Legislation as Code

February 27, 2019

Apparently, everything that has the word Blockchain attached to it is now news-worthy. Or at least that’s how I think this relatively small R&D collaboration between AUSTRAC and Swinburne University of Technology got a mention a couple of days ago in ZDNet, a pretty respectable technology site that has been around forever. https://www.zdnet.com/article/austrac-trialling-blockchain-to-automate-funds-transfer-instructions/ Coding the … More Legislation as Code

Financial Intelligence as a Platform Business

January 6, 2019

We have all read about network effects and how they underlie the business models of fast-growing and high-margin companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Apple. The book Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary seeks to distill the key characteristics of these so-called Platform Businesses, whose overarching purpose is “to consummate matches among users … More Financial Intelligence as a Platform Business

Practical Algorithms for Distributed Privacy-Preserving Risk Modelling

September 3, 2017

In a previous post on the problem of detecting complex financial crimes, I described the following basic technology framework for financial intelligence units (FIUs) and their partner agencies and reporting entities (REs) to engage in collaborative but privacy-preserving and distributed risk modelling using confidential computing technologies. In this post, I describe a few concrete algorithms that … More Practical Algorithms for Distributed Privacy-Preserving Risk Modelling

How to Quickly and Meaningfully Improve the Financial System’s Collective Ability to Detect Crimes

August 27, 2017

Complex financial crimes are hard to detect primarily because data related to different pieces of the overall puzzle are usually distributed across a network of financial institutions, regulators, and law-enforcement agencies. The problem is also rapidly increasing in complexity because new platforms are emerging all the time that facilitate the transfer of value across a … More How to Quickly and Meaningfully Improve the Financial System’s Collective Ability to Detect Crimes

How to Link Millions of Addresses with Ten Lines of Code in Ten Minutes

July 16, 2017

Solving big hairy problems like detecting complex financial crimes requires solving a series of smaller, mundane but technically non-trivial problems. Performing efficient record linkage on large databases with tens to hundreds of millions of rows of data is one such pesky problem. A few of my colleagues have just made a small dent on the overall … More How to Link Millions of Addresses with Ten Lines of Code in Ten Minutes

Detecting Financial Crimes: Current State, Limitations, and A Way Forward

July 8, 2017

Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) around the world collect data like threshold transaction reports, international fund transfer reports, and suspicious matter/activity reports from Reporting Entities (REs), which include banks, money remitters, casinos, law firms, real-estate companies, and financial companies. They may also get data about entities of interest from partner agencies (PAs) like law-enforcement agencies (LEAs) … More Detecting Financial Crimes: Current State, Limitations, and A Way Forward