Case Study
AFCX Boosts Businesses' ability to tackle financial and cyber crime with MIP.
Launched in 2016, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange is an independent, not-for-profit organisation designed to assist businesses combat financial-related crimes.
Established by the nation’s four major banks as an independent entity, the AFCX works collaboratively with government and law enforcement agencies.
By facilitating the sharing of data, analytic capabilities, and evidence-based insights, the AFCX provides members with intelligence that allows them to go beyond simply policing transactions and investigating irregularities. The organisation is supported by the Commonwealth Department of Home Affairs and is a key element in Australia’s 2015 - 2018 National Organised Crime Response Plan.
>>
Challenges
01
Working with tightly constrained internal resources
02
Managing and processing a rapidly growing volume of data
03
Needing to better support data-based collaboration between banks.
>>
Outcomes
01
Improved ability to work with very large data sets
02
Minimal disruption to existing systems
01
Easy ongoing management of platform
>>
Business Challenges
Focus on leveraging external expertise
AFCX is staffed with highly specialised resources and is heavily reliant on a range of external parties for ongoing support. The organisation needed a new partnership to assist it overcome challenges that had emerged within its data sharing, processing and collaboration platform.
Growing volumes of data
When initially established, AFCX was structured to undertake a pilot project involving the exchange of financial crime and cybercrime data between banks. When the organisation moved into production phase, the existing infrastructure was unable to adequately cope with the volumes of data needing to be processed.
Improving data-based collaboration
Enabling collaboration between banks over data that could potentially expose fraudulent activity is a critical part of AFCX’s operations. The initial tool of choice was Atlassian’s JIRA tool, however it was found this could not scale to match the increasing number of data projects involved.
>>
Solutions
In late 2017, the AFCX team recognised a change to its platform architecture was needed to allow the organisation meeting the requirements of its members.
David Pegley, Managing Director of the AFCX, oversaw this transformation. “At this point we were already working with about 3 million different projects and trying to manage them with the Atlassian JIRA we had used during our pilot phase. While the tool had performed very well, it was simply not designed to deal with that number of concurrent projects,” says Pegley.
Pegley says the organisation needed a technology partner and software that could help it more readily bridge the necessary gap between users and back-end data stores, allowing data to pass between the two in a highly secure manner. The AFCX team assessed a range of tools, to compare alternatives and understand the value they could deliver for the organisation.
We currently have more than 3 million records of fraudulent events in our system and that number is constantly growing. MIP and Alteryx helps us extract real value from this data for our members on a daily basis.
David Pegley
Managing Director, Australian Financial Crimes Exchange
“We were also conscious that we wanted to do things in a different way from the major banks as we were looking for a point of differentiation rather than simply duplicating what was already being done. We also wanted to be light, flexible and nimble rather than building a big infrastructure.”
After completing a thorough assessment, the decision was made in late 2017 to commission technology partner MIP to deploy Alteryx data analytics software within the existing AFCX IT environment.
“We could clearly see that MIP offered the mix of technical competence and industry experience that we required,” says Pegley. “They understood the challenge we faced and the way in which deploying Alteryx would help us to overcome this.”
>>
Outcomes
Improved ability to work with large data sets AFCX is now handling a catalogue comprising over eleven different data types. These data sets, provided by the major banks, are very complex and contain information concerning fraudulent events at a transactional level. Alteryx allows this data to be handled efficiently and effectively at all times.
What had worked for us in our pilot phase could not be scaled to meet the demands we were experiencing once in a production enviroment.
David Pegley
Managing Director, Australian Financial Crimes Exchange
Minimal Disruption to existing systems
After reviewing the system requirements, MIP recommended an architecture where Alteryx is used in the backend while the user front end continues to be provided by JIRA. This allows AFCX to continue to use the Atlassian tool for collaboration between banks while Alteryx manages the large volumes of data at speed.
Easy ongoing management of platform
Once the Alteryx deployment had been completed over a three-month period, the AFCX team found the new software very easy to manage and maintain.
With the new platform fully operational and performing as expected, attention is now shifting to finding other ways in which the system can be used. “Every day we are coming across new use cases for the platform and the data sets we now have in place,” says Pegley. “We will be constantly refining and leveraging what we now have in place.
Banks are now able to more efficiently contribute data to and retrieve data from the AFCX platform.
“Alteryx will provide us in the future with the capability to identify and join data sets and so gain insights from the data that a single financial institution on its own would not see. This will be very powerful.” Pegley says AFCX will continue to work with MIP to ensure the platform continues to deliver the levels of service and insight required by members. “They have been a valuable technology partner for us and I can see this continuing over coming years.”