Harnessing synthetic data to address fraud in cross-border payments

The sharing of data between financial institutions is widely recognised as a key component in the industry’s efforts to combat fraud. Broader access to multiple sources of financial data is also critical to the development of high-quality fraud detection mechanisms based on artificial intelligence (AI). Given the challenges relating to sharing real financial data across countries and institutions, the use of synthetic data has recently become critical to enabling the exploration of broader data sharing and supporting open collaboration in AI model development. To generate synthetic data that can substitute for real data, computer algorithms closely mimic the key statistical properties of genuine data, while strictly preserving the privacy and sovereignty of the source data. This paper presents the results of an ongoing exploration into the generation of high-utility synthetic datasets of cross-border payment transactions using transformer models and discusses its application to the development of AI-based fraud prevention solutions.