Commonwealth Bank of Australia is to make its artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for countering abusive transaction messages available for free, to any bank in the world.
The AI model helps to identify digital payment transactions that include harassing, threatening or offensive messages within the payment description field.
CBA group customer advocate Angela MacMillan says: “We developed this technology because we noticed that some customers were using transaction descriptions as a way to harass or threaten others.
“By using this model we can scan unusual transactional activity and identify patterns and instances deemed to be high risk so that the bank can investigate these and take action.”
The model detects around 1,500 high-risk cases annually, she says.
The model and source code are being made available this week through the bank’s partnership with H2O.ai on GitHub, the world’s largest platform for hosting source code.
“By sharing our source code and model with any bank in the world, it will help financial institutions have better visibility of technology-facilitated abuse. This can help to inform action the bank may choose to take to help protect customers,” says MacMillan.
This announcement follows the bank’s pilot with the NSW Police earlier this year to refer perpetrators of financial abuse to the police, with customer consent.