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.