Creating a world where financial crime doesn’t pay

Cambridge, UK, 31 March 2023: Featurespace successfully completed the PETS challenge, securing a place as one of the UK winners. The winners of the challenge, which was convened to drive innovation in Privacy-Enhancing Technologies that reinforce democratic values, were announced at President Biden’s second Summit for Democracy.

The winning solutions combined different PETs to allow the AI models to learn to make better predictions without exposing any sensitive data. World-leading experts competed for cash prizes from a combined UK-U.S. prize pool of £1.3 m / $1.6m. The prizes encouraged the development of innovative solutions that address practical data privacy concerns in real-world scenarios.

The Featurespace solution achieved the highest accuracy score in the UK competition for its ability to detect financial crime, returning an average “Area-Under-Precision-Recall-Curve” of 0.94. The solution was also singled out with a special award for its usability and production readiness.

Featurespace’s participation in the challenge enabled the company to develop world-leading privacy-enhancing technologies from scratch, leveraging its existing deep expertise in machine-learning technologies and the financial payments domain. The privilege of participating created an opportunity for the Featurespace’s Innovation Lab to rise to the challenge and they delivered outstanding work that has gained recognition at the highest level.

Iker Perez Lopez, Principal Research Scientist and one of the Featurespace PETs team members commented: “This challenge has been an exciting opportunity to leverage our own innovations for a topical use case. We were very motivated to be in competition with top ranking universities and research labs across the world, and we are proud to be a recipient of an award recognizing our contributions. I feel reassured that this team remains at the forefront of innovation in financial data privacy and fraud detection.”

Innovations that protect privacy and financial wellbeing are crucial to safeguarding our communities, and initiatives like the PETS challenge all work to facilitate the progression of technologies that can make a difference in this important area of society.

Click here to watch the winners being announced at the Summit for Democracy.

The United States and United Kingdom will continue to build on their shared interest in advancing responsible innovation in PETs. In May, a joint Demo Day will be held in London to deepen transatlantic communities of practice among UK and U.S. privacy researchers and government representatives. Further collaboration in this space, such as developing tools and guidance to assist practitioners to adopt these technologies effectively and responsibly, is being actively explored.

Learn more about the work of Featurespace’s scientists and get their personal insights on critical topics such as model fairness, bias and trust, along with model explainability and how to build effective data science teams.