Towards Collaborative Anti-Money Laundering Among Financial Institutions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tian, Zhihua, Ding, Yuan, Qu, Wenjie, Yu, Xiang, Gong, Enchao, Liu, Jian, Ren, Kui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tian, Zhihua
Ding, Yuan
Qu, Wenjie
Yu, Xiang
Gong, Enchao
Liu, Jian
Ren, Kui
author_facet Tian, Zhihua
Ding, Yuan
Qu, Wenjie
Yu, Xiang
Gong, Enchao
Liu, Jian
Ren, Kui
contents Money laundering is the process that intends to legalize the income derived from illicit activities, thus facilitating their entry into the monetary flow of the economy without jeopardizing their source. It is crucial to identify such activities accurately and reliably in order to enforce anti-money laundering (AML). Despite considerable efforts to AML, a large number of such activities still go undetected. Rule-based methods were first introduced and are still widely used in current detection systems. With the rise of machine learning, graph-based learning methods have gained prominence in detecting illicit accounts through the analysis of money transfer graphs. Nevertheless, these methods generally assume that the transaction graph is centralized, whereas in practice, money laundering activities usually span multiple financial institutions. Due to regulatory, legal, commercial, and customer privacy concerns, institutions tend not to share data, restricting their utility in practical usage. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm that supports performing AML over multiple institutions while protecting the security and privacy of local data. To evaluate, we construct Alipay-ECB, a real-world dataset comprising digital transactions from Alipay, the world's largest mobile payment platform, alongside transactions from E-Commerce Bank (ECB). The dataset includes over 200 million accounts and 300 million transactions, covering both intra-institution transactions and those between Alipay and ECB. This makes it the largest real-world transaction graph available for analysis. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively identify cross-institution money laundering subgroups. Additionally, experiments on synthetic datasets also demonstrate that our method is efficient, requiring only a few minutes on datasets with millions of transactions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19952
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Collaborative Anti-Money Laundering Among Financial Institutions
Tian, Zhihua
Ding, Yuan
Qu, Wenjie
Yu, Xiang
Gong, Enchao
Liu, Jian
Ren, Kui
Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Money laundering is the process that intends to legalize the income derived from illicit activities, thus facilitating their entry into the monetary flow of the economy without jeopardizing their source. It is crucial to identify such activities accurately and reliably in order to enforce anti-money laundering (AML). Despite considerable efforts to AML, a large number of such activities still go undetected. Rule-based methods were first introduced and are still widely used in current detection systems. With the rise of machine learning, graph-based learning methods have gained prominence in detecting illicit accounts through the analysis of money transfer graphs. Nevertheless, these methods generally assume that the transaction graph is centralized, whereas in practice, money laundering activities usually span multiple financial institutions. Due to regulatory, legal, commercial, and customer privacy concerns, institutions tend not to share data, restricting their utility in practical usage. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm that supports performing AML over multiple institutions while protecting the security and privacy of local data. To evaluate, we construct Alipay-ECB, a real-world dataset comprising digital transactions from Alipay, the world's largest mobile payment platform, alongside transactions from E-Commerce Bank (ECB). The dataset includes over 200 million accounts and 300 million transactions, covering both intra-institution transactions and those between Alipay and ECB. This makes it the largest real-world transaction graph available for analysis. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively identify cross-institution money laundering subgroups. Additionally, experiments on synthetic datasets also demonstrate that our method is efficient, requiring only a few minutes on datasets with millions of transactions.
title Towards Collaborative Anti-Money Laundering Among Financial Institutions
topic Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19952