Digital banking ‘unicorn’ Revolut has revealed that UK banks are interested in its new machine learning technology for tackling money laundering and card fraud.
London-based Revolut said it is determined to tackle the issue with algorithms, leveraging the power of machine learning and computational techniques.
“I speak with banks all the time, and several of them have already approached us with offers to buy this technology,” said founder and CEO Nik Storonsky.
Over the last two months, Revolut has been testing a system which is able to detect suspicious activity in real-time, based on abnormal spending behaviour.
If a customer’s payments drastically deviate from their usual spending habits, Revolut is able to automatically freeze card payments until a customer verifies from within the app that it is actually them.
Since officially putting this new system in place, the company has seen a fourfold reduction in card fraud levels, primarily tackling common cases such as e-commerce payments, card cloning and card theft.
It has also just launched new machine learning technology for detecting money laundering, a dynamic mathematical model that calculates a risk score for each user based on their activity history.
“What we can accurately display in ten minutes would typically take a large bank over an hour to establish with their current manual processes,” said Storonsky.
“If you’re on a mission to reach tens of millions of customers and scale your business globally, then you cannot rely solely on manual human processes to effectively protect your customers against financial crime, especially as criminals are becoming more savvy in their tactics.”
The company is now adding the finishing touches for several new markets including the United States, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.