8th Workshop on Machine Learning in Finance

Abstract

The financial industry leverages machine learning in more ways than just finding the right alpha signal. It grapples with supply chains, business processes, marketing, churn, fraud, and money laundering, all while maintaining compliance with the various regulatory frameworks it is beholden to. Due to the sheer volume of wealth being handled by the financial industry and its critical role in everyday life, it has been a lucrative target for a wide spectrum of ever-evolving bad actors. With each successive iteration of this workshop, we have attempted to capture the breadth of these actors - fraudsters, money launderers, market manipulators, and potentially nation-state-level risks. The emerging advances in Generative AI make this a particularly exciting time to host this workshop. GenAI offers groundbreaking approaches to handling the various data types prevalent in the financial sector. From a security point of view, bad actors are actively using Generative AI creatively to thwart conventional defenses (e.g. voice cloning, better synthetic identities), and this workshop's audience would benefit from commonly applicable defenses & best practices against such threats. Last but not the least, there is now an increasing willingness from the financial industry towards deeper engagement and data sharing with academia.