Investment Management
Financial Services

Digital fraud down 25%.
Trust in the platform, restored.

AI-powered fraud detection and identity verification built into a major investment firm’s trading systems, catching account takeover and identity fraud in real time without slowing down legitimate traders.

25% reduction in
digital fraud
Real-time transaction
monitoring
Automated fraud and identity
verification
Stronger compliance and
audit trails

Client

A major investment firm in the investment management and financial services sector, serving a large base of institutional and high-net-worth investors.

Goal

Reduce digital fraud and identity theft across its trading and investment operations, with the sharpest exposure in multi-asset derivatives, FX, and swaps.

High-value trades, high-value targets.

The firm’s exposure sat squarely in its highest-value desks: multi-asset derivatives, FX, and swaps, where large transactions and complex counterparty arrangements draw both fraudsters and regulators. Its client base of institutional and high-net-worth investors expected tight security without added friction.

Three problems compounded each other. Regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions demanded auditable, secure customer due diligence without adding operational drag. Identity verification needed to plug directly into trading permissions and settlement workflows, not sit alongside them. And fraud detection had to catch spoofing, account takeover, and insider abuse in real time, across product lines generating high volumes of fast, cross-venue activity.

Three constraints were non-negotiable:

  • Strict regulatory compliance across jurisdictions
  • Identity verification tied to trading and settlement systems
  • Real-time detection across high-volume, cross-venue activity

Identity and fraud detection, built into the trade itself.

We advised the firm to fold identity verification directly into account provisioning and trading authorisation, rather than treating it as a separate check. Document verification, biometric liveness, and device fingerprinting now run at onboarding, creating an auditable link between a person’s identity and the credentials they trade with.

Identity verification stopped being a gate at the door and became part of the trading credential itself.

Machine learning models trained on historical trade data, and enriched with external threat intelligence, watch order book behaviour, transaction velocity, counterparty patterns, and cross-asset correlations for signs of spoofing, account takeover, wash-like activity, or misuse of privileged access. A real-time scoring engine assigns risk to every session, order, and settlement, triggering a graduated response: step-up authentication, an automated trade hold, or a compliance alert, depending on the score.

Routine verification and fraud triage were automated, with auto-escalation rules and automated evidence collection feeding straight into the firm’s case management tools. Comprehensive logging and immutable audit trails were built in throughout, aligned to KYC and AML obligations across jurisdictions, all running on cloud-native infrastructure integrated with the firm’s trading and order management systems.

A quarter less fraud, and cleaner audits to prove it.

25% Digital fraud fell by a quarter after deployment, with the sharpest drops in account takeover and identity-based fraud across derivatives, FX, and swaps desks.
Automated Fraud detection and identity verification now run with far less manual intervention, cutting investigation time and processing overhead.
Fewer false positives Advanced analytics improved detection fidelity, letting investigators prioritise the highest-risk cases faster.
Audit-ready Stronger identity controls and immutable audit trails gave compliance teams clear evidence on demand and improved the firm’s regulatory posture.

The programme did more than cut fraud. It gave the firm real-time visibility into its highest-risk trading desks, tightened its compliance posture across jurisdictions, and gave institutional and high-net-worth clients more reason to trust the platform with their business.

* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.

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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.