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.

This workshop aims to explore the intersection of Generative AI with the rich tapestry of financial data types, seeking to uncover new methodologies and techniques that can enhance predictive analytics, fraud detection, and customer insights across the sector. By harnessing these advancements in AI, we can pave the way to not only understand customer behavior but also anticipate their needs more effectively, leading to superior customer outcomes and more personalized services. Our objective is to shed light on the challenges and opportunities presented by the diverse data formats in finance. We aim to bridge the gap between the dominance of traditional models for tabular data analysis and the emerging potential of Generative AI to revolutionize the treatment of time series, click streams, and other unstructured data forms.

The finance industry is constantly faced with an ever evolving set of challenges including credit card fraud, identity theft, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal sales of firearms. There is also the newly emerging threat of fake news in financial media that can lead to distortions in trading strategies and investment decisions. In addition, traditional problems such as customer analytics, forecasting, and recommendations take on a unique flavor when applied to financial data. A number of new ideas are emerging to tackle all these problems including self-supervised learning methods, deep learning algorithms, network/graph based solutions as well as linguistic approaches. These methods must often be able to work in real-time and be able handle large volumes of data. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the problems faced by the financial industry and potential solutions. We plan to invite regular papers, positional papers and extended abstracts of work in progress. We will also encourage short papers from financial industry practitioners that introduce domain specific problems and challenges to academic researchers.

The finance industry is constantly faced with an ever evolving set of challenges including credit card fraud, identity theft, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal sales of firearms. There is also the newly emerging threat of fake news in financial media that can lead to distortions in trading strategies and investment decisions. In addition, traditional problems such as customer analytics, forecasting, and recommendations take on a unique flavor when applied to financial data. A number of new ideas are emerging to tackle all these problems including semi-supervised learning methods, deep learning algorithms, network/graph based solutions as well as linguistic approaches. These methods must often be able to work in real-time and be able handle large volumes of data. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the problems faced by the financial industry and potential solutions. We plan to invite regular papers, positional papers and extended abstracts of work in progress. We will also encourage short papers from financial industry practitioners that introduce domain specific problems and challenges to academic researchers.

The finance industry is constantly faced with an ever evolving set of challenges including credit card fraud, identity theft, network intrusion, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal sales of firearms. There are also newly emerging threats such as fake news in financial media that can lead to distortions in trading strategies and investment decisions. In addition, traditional problems such as customer analytics, forecasting, and recommendations take on a unique flavor when applied to financial data. A number of new ideas are emerging to tackle all these problems including semi-supervised learning methods, deep learning algorithms, network/graph based solutions as well as linguistic approaches. These methods must often be able to work in real-time and be able handle large volumes of data. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss both the problems faced by the financial industry and potential solutions. We have invited regular papers, positional papers and extended abstracts of work in progress. We have also encouraged short papers from financial industry practitioners that introduce domain specific problems and challenges to academic researchers. This event is the fourth in a sequence of finance related workshops we have organized at KDD since 2017.

We present a novel end-to-end trainable OCR system combining a CNN for feature extraction with 1-D LSTMs for sequence modeling. We present results on English and Arabic handwriting data, and on English machine print data, showing state-of-the-art performance. We believe that our method is simpler than existing 2D LSTM models, and will make it easier to use techniques borrowed from CNN research in computer vision to improve OCR performance.