Judge a Transaction by the Company It Keeps — Somya Rai & MD Sharique, EXL
EXL developed an advanced fraud detection system that augments XGBoost with Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings. Traditional tabular models struggle to capture fraud signals residing in transaction neighborhoods. The system's innovative design includes meticulous sampling strategies, disjoint monthly graph construction for leakage control, and a GraphSAGE architecture that aggregates mean, max, and standard deviation of neighbor features to detect subtle fraud patterns. Emphasizing explainability for regulatory compliance and analyst trust, it also features a highly optimized serving architecture achieving 3ms P99 latency, pivoting to edge prediction to reduce cache footprint from 60GB to 2-3GB. This led to a 27-33% relative lift in true positive rates and a projected $65 million incremental fraud capture.