apply(risk) 2023 | Fighting Fraud with Machine Learning at Remitly

by:
Jake Weholt, Engineering Manager, Machine Learning - Fraud Detection, Remitly

“The rise of digital transactions and online platforms has brought about new challenges in combating fraud. Traditional rule-based systems often fall short in identifying sophisticated fraud patterns, leading to significant financial losses and compromised user trust. This necessitates the adoption of advanced technologies such as machine learning for effective fraud detection and prevention. This conference talk aims to explore the utilization of machine learning algorithms and techniques to combat fraud across various domains.”

Sounds boring, right? While all true, fighting fraud with machine learning requires so much more than simply “adopting advanced technologies such as machine learning for effective fraud detection and prevention.” You can blame ChatGPT for that paragraph (and for also oversimplifying our heavily nuanced and complicated domain).

In this talk, we will explore what it actually takes to develop, launch, and maintain ML models in production in the highly dynamic and adversarial environment of FinTech risk. I will share how Remitly thinks about risk/fraud tradeoffs, how we frame problems to build successful ML products, and how this influences our team structures. I will also share some lessons (and mistakes) learned from years of developing valuable, robust, and customer-centric fraud models that score transactions every second of every day, to transform the lives of millions of immigrants and their families by providing the most trusted financial services on the planet.

apply(): The ML data engineering Conference
Presented by Tecton

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