Oct 23, 2026

A Bank Trained Its Own Foundation Model to Catch Fraud — Freddy Lecue, Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo pre-trained a transformer from scratch on billions of customer transactions rather than words, then fine-tuned it for fraud detection, credit decisions, anti-money laundering and marketing. The talk covers how tabular transaction data was tokenized, the model's size and training setup, and results that beat the production XGBoost fraud model on both detection and false positives while meeting real-time latency requirements.

Oct 13, 2026

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.

Jul 30, 2026

Let's integrate AI Agents in Event-Sourced Systems — Divakar Kumar, FlyersSoft

This presentation explores integrating AI agents into existing event-sourced architectures to resolve ambiguous cases in real-time fraud detection. By leveraging a semantic layer built from various bounded contexts (transaction, device, account), specialized agents like Risk Analyzer and Behavior Analyzer use tools and short-term memory to reach a verdict, addressing the "gray zone" where traditional rule-based and ML systems fall short. The approach emphasizes layering agents without replacing existing infrastructure, enhancing judgment in production systems.

Jun 28, 2026

AI-Driven Multi-Document Correlation for Financial Compliance - Varsha Shah, Independent

Varsha Shah's research introduces an AI-driven framework for enterprise financial compliance and fraud detection, overcoming the limitations of traditional systems that analyze documents in isolation. The framework combines graph-based entity correlation, adaptive probabilistic risk modeling, and cross-jurisdictional normalization to uncover hidden fraud patterns across payroll, tax, procurement, and financial records. Evaluated on 3 million anonymized records across four jurisdictions, it demonstrates significant improvements in detection accuracy (91% precision, 87% recall), reduces false positives by 76%, and lowers manual audit effort by 40%, ultimately transforming compliance from a reactive process into a proactive, intelligence-driven capability through continuous learning.

Mar 31, 2026

This AI Company Catches Fraud Across the Internet

Variance, emerging from three years in stealth with a $21 million Series A, is transforming enterprise risk and compliance through purpose-built AI agents. Founded by ex-Apple engineers, the company automates complex tasks like fraud detection, content review, and identity verification for Fortune 500s and platforms such as GoFundMe. They discuss the strategic reasons for stealth, technical challenges of integrating disparate data sources (including UI scraping), the shift from legacy systems to self-healing AI agent architectures, and how their lean, AI-maximalist team detects sophisticated threats like state-sponsored fraud rings.

Dec 19, 2025

The History of The Fintech Industry, Explained

a16z's David Haber and Plaid CEO Zach Perret chart the dramatic seasons of fintech, from the explosive VC-fueled boom of 2020-2021 to the deep freeze of 2022 and its current resurgence. They explore the transformative forces reshaping the industry today, including AI's dual role as both a primary tool for sophisticated fraud and the ultimate defense against it. The conversation also covers the rise of embedded finance, the renewed importance of deposits, and how incumbents are finally embracing external software, with Plaid's own journey serving as a microcosm of the industry's evolution.