Financial Crimes Detection – Mental Models 4 Life

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

The Financial Intelligence Ecosystem

August 12, 2018

Financial intelligence is not an easy area to get into. There are not that many textbooks on the subject. There are also many information silos, and what one sees is often limited to the immediate surrounds of where one sits in the entire ecosystem. Having spent the last 2.5 years working with practitioners of financial … More The Financial Intelligence Ecosystem

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