Data challenges for AI: Woodhurst’s podcast debut
Last week I was interviewed by Kyle Winterbottom for the upcoming Data Leaders of the North podcast. The podcast series will cover a range of topics on and around data. From building a Data Eco-System to creating a Data Culture; expanding into large-scale Tech Change and productionising AI. I was there to talk about our […]
Can we unpack the black box?
Some machine learning tools are incredibly complex. So complex that they are considered to be “black box” systems. On the one hand, they are determining more and more accurate outputs to increasingly difficult problems. But on the other, the inner workings of these solutions can’t easily be understood by a human, and the rationale for […]
How data science has changed fraud detection
We live in a data driven world where many of the actions we take, as a person or a business, can be recorded and quantified. Until recently, businesses did not have the computing power or the expertise to take advantage of this, but now with advancements in modern technology, machine learning is transforming industries. This […]
Would you buy a house by looking through the letterbox?
Traditional transaction monitoring systems use a number of algorithms to assign a risk score to any given transaction. If that risk score exceeds a threshold then the transaction may be blocked and will require further investigation. For example, withdrawing £100 from an ATM is unlikely to trigger an alert for investigation. However, withdrawing £100 at […]
Implementing Innovation
Introducing innovative technologies in banks is hard. We’ve seen it first hand a number of times and there is no end to the reported failures or abandoned projects across the industry. Partly this is due to the incongruence between existing and new technologies: legacy systems don’t tend to take to innovation. But it is also […]
Imperfect Intelligence, Part II – A biased system
The awesome potential and promise of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is coming to fruition in the financial services industry, with 80% of enterprises already investing in AI technology as of 2017. This industry is expected to grow to US$57.6 billion by 2021, with the pledge to provide more accurate and objective judgments to help […]
Imperfect Intelligence, Part I – Garbage Data
Artificial Intelligence is here to make your life easier. It can recommend movies that you will like, it can drive you around relatively safely, diagnose your medical ailments, and it can even predict what you’re going to buy before you yourself know. In the right hands, AI is undoubtedly here to enhance your life. But […]
Getting the whole picture
As a necessary matter of compliance, banks routinely risk-score their customers to ensure they comply with their pre-defined risk-appetite. Whether during onboarding or through monitoring customers and transactions, every entity is screened by the major financial crime divisions, usually broken down into: Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering / Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CTF), Sanctions, Fraud, and […]
Machine Learning for the foreseeable future
On the eve of the 2016 election, a number of polling websites, including the New York Times, gave Donald Trump less than a 1% chance of beating Hillary Clinton. In the case of Brexit, it was a hard-learned lesson that “surely not” isn’t an entirely accurate way to forecast whether something will occur or not. […]
Introducing the Woodhurst Blueprint ©
The study of history often helps to draw out ways in which we might respond differently to similar circumstances in the future, usually with the aim of achieving a more advantageous or positive outcome. However, the frequency with which single events, sequences of events and cycles of events reoccur with almost exactly the same result […]