Glory at the White House for Featurespace fraud busters

Cambridge company Featurespace, whose machine learning technology fights online financial fraud, was named as one of the winners of an inaugural transatlantic crime-busting competition at President Biden’s second Summit for Democracy.
The company emerged victorious in the International PETs challenge launched by the UK and US governments to promote privacy-enhancing technology solutions and help create a world where financial crime doesn’t pay.

Business Weekly understands that Featurespace was among the first companies in either the UK or US to produce a prototype to a fast-track timetable. Now, as one of the UK’s champions, it shares in a $1.6 million combined prize pot – and a treasure trove of kudos.

The winning solutions combined different PETs to allow AI models to learn to make better predictions without exposing any sensitive data. Solutions addressed practical data privacy concerns in real world scenarios.

The Featurespace solution achieved the highest accuracy score in the UK competition for its ability to detect financial crime, returning an average ‘Area-Under-Precision-Recall-Curve’ of 0.94. The solution was also singled out with a special award for its usability and production readiness.

Featurespace’s participation in the challenge enabled the company to develop world-leading privacy-enhancing technologies from scratch, leveraging its existing deep expertise in machine learning technologies and the financial payments domain.

The privilege of participating created an opportunity for the Research and Innovation team at Featurespace to rise to the challenge and they delivered outstanding work that has gained recognition at the highest level.

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