Financial crime is a large and growing problem, in some way touching almost
every financial institution. Financial institutions are the front line in the
war against financial crime and accordingly, must devote substantial human and
technology resources to this effort. Current processes to detect financial
misconduct have limitations in their ability to effectively differentiate
between malicious behavior and ordinary financial activity. These limitations
tend to result in gross over-reporting of suspicious activity that necessitate
time-intensive and costly manual review. Advances in technology used in this
domain, including machine learning based approaches, can improve upon the
effectiveness of financial institutions' existing processes, however, a key
challenge that most financial institutions continue to face is that they
address financial crimes in isolation without any insight from other firms.
Where financial institutions address financial crimes through the lens of their
own firm, perpetrators may devise sophisticated strategies that may span across
institutions and geographies. Financial institutions continue to work
relentlessly to advance their capabilities, forming partnerships across
institutions to share insights, patterns and capabilities. These public-private
partnerships are subject to stringent regulatory and data privacy requirements,
thereby making it difficult to rely on traditional technology solutions. In
this paper, we propose a methodology to share key information across
institutions by using a federated graph learning platform that enables us to
build more accurate machine learning models by leveraging federated learning
and also graph learning approaches. We demonstrated that our federated model
outperforms local model by 20% with the UK FCA TechSprint data set. This new
platform opens up a door to efficiently detecting global money laundering
activity.