Detection of Abuse in Financial Transaction Descriptions Using Machine Learning

Anna Leontjeva

Abstract:

Since introducing changes to the New Payments
Platform (NPP) to include longer messages as payment descriptions, it has been identified that people are now using it
for communication, and in some cases, the system was being
used as a targeted form of domestic and family violence. This
type of tech-assisted abuse poses new challenges in terms of
identification, actions and approaches to rectify this behaviour.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Artificial Intelligence Labs
team (CBA AI Labs) has developed a new system using advances
in deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) to
create a powerful abuse detector that periodically scores all the
transactions, and identifies cases of high-risk abuse in millions of
records. In this paper, we describe the problem of tech-assisted
abuse in the context of banking services, outline the developed
model and its performance, and the operating framework more
broadly.