GBG wins Best AI/Machine Learning Innovation of the Year award

SINGAPORE – 29 September 2021 – GBG (AIM:GBG), the global expert in digital identity, helping businesses prevent fraud and meet complex compliance requirements, has today announced it has won the award for Best AI or Machine Learning Innovation of the Year from Asia Risk Awards 2021.

The biggest challenge faced by financial institutions today is not the increasing volume of financial crime, but in the creativity and sophistication in which fraud attacks are executed. In managing uncharted financial crimes, financial institutions (FIs) are seeing higher false positive rates, higher fraud alerts, and more missed frauds, which are detrimental to achieving target business growth when customers are unable to onboard and transact with success.

Southeast Asia’s first fraud bureau, CTOS IDguard, which is powered by GBG’s fraud and financial crime platform, is currently deploying GBG Machine Learning and is seeing an uplift in fraud detection of up to 30% for credit card applications. Another Tier 1 global bank has also tested its machine learning technology to see a 22% reduction in false positives for credit card applications. The machine learning technology at GBG has specifically helped its customer base in addressing a range of financial crimes including account takeover, identity theft, loan never-payment, and money laundering.

GBG developed its machine learning capabilities in response to the increasing innovativeness and complexity in which fraud attacks are executed. With Financial Crime 4.0 escalating, a rule-based system is insufficient to detect and keep up with digital and emerging fraud typologies. GBG’s machine learning utilises both supervised and unsupervised algorithms; these algorithms are built into their core financial crime platform and can be easily and quickly configured, trained and deployed via a low code/no code user interface. In addition, it also seamlessly accepts the import of custom models created in different algorithms via a Python notebook-like interface.

“Winning Asia Risk 2021 award for the Best AI or Machine Learning Innovation of the Year is testament to GBG’s success to automate, scale and unlock the value of deriving intelligence from a range of historical, new and additional data in real-time. The goal of machine learning is to uncover implicit inconsistencies in behavior that are not an act of human error, analyse and flag out anomalies to detect and prevent new possible fraud scenarios as quickly as possible. It’s a watershed moment for our whole team across the globe,” says Dev Dhiman, APAC Managing Director of GBG.

“Machine learning helps financial institutions enhance two fundamental processes – customer experience management and financial crime prevention. Reducing false positive rates is not just about streamlining internal processes and costs, but in enabling legitimate customers to onboard and continuously transact with success. GBG’s machine learning which underpins its core financial crime technology can help financial institutions maintain stronger customer lifetime value while prioritising financial crime management,” concludes Dhiman

A recent survey conducted by GBG with 118 financial institutions across Southeast Asia found machine learning is quickly becoming a mainstream solution for fraud detection and prevention. In the survey, machine learning is the number one fraud prevention solution respondents are exploring this year, with more than one-third selecting this option above others.

According to Adam Emslie, Head of Analytics at GBG, the most important factor about machine learning models is not that they’re workable, but that they meet the efficiency and accuracy standards as demanded by customers and industry.

“Stemming from a single end to end solution, GBG’s Digital Risk Management and Intelligence platform passes data from origination and transactions directly into the machine learning models bypassing the need for data extraction, resulting in faster model training and deployment than what the industry typically offers. In addition, fraud and compliance objectives can be achieved through multiple workflows with the GBG Intelligence Center. Fraud analysts are enabled to prioritise and enhance accuracy in detection and prevention of larger fraud challenges,” says Emslie.

The Asia Risk Technology Awards are the longest-running and most prestigious awards for firms and individuals involved in the Asia’s derivatives markets and in risk management. The awards recognise vendors that are serving financial services firms in meaningful and innovative ways. The team at Asia Risk spoke about why it chose GBG for this to win the prestigious best in class for AI or Machine Learning Innovation of the Year.

“With instances of financial crime increasing around the world, firms are struggling to cope with the rising volume of investigations that they have to conduct and ensuring that their fraud detection tools are accurate and efficient. The judges were most impressed with the performance of GBG’s artificial intelligence and machine learning to help reduce false positives and improve fraud detection of emerging typologies,” says Blake Evans-Pritchard, bureau chief for Asia Risk.

The Asia Risk Awards 2021 were announced online throughout September 27-30, 2021.
The win for GBG is the latest in a string of industry-recognised achievements for the company:

• Inaugural naming on the prestigious 2021 IDC FinTech top 100 Rankings by IDC Financial Insights, with the company coming in at 66th.
• Recognition as enterprise fraud category leader in Chartis RiskTech Quadrant 2021