AI | Innovation Challenge

Financial and professional services (FPS) are at the vanguard of investing in and adopting AI technologies, with businesses harnessing the benefits of AI across priority areas including improving customer experience, fraud detection and efficiency.

At the same time, AI has greatly increased the capabilities of those inflicting cybercrimes and fraud on FPS firms both in terms of creating new forms of attack, but also in increasing the volume and impact of those attacks.

The City of London Corporation has previously delivered two Cyber Innovation Challenges to provide a platform for collaboration between FPS and tech companies to address a key cyber threat through innovative tech solutions.

Collaborating across a six week sprint, technology participants have engaged 1:1 with FPS to accelerate solutions to a key threat or “use case” faced by the sector. Participants have also benefited from sessions delivered by Supporting Partners including Microsoft, the City of London Police, Department for Business and Trade, London and Partners, and UK Finance.

In response to AI lowering the barrier to entry for cyber criminals and the anticipated increase in AI enabled crimes, the City of London Cooperation is proposing to deliver an AI Innovation Challenge for 2024. The Challenge will follow a similar format to previous iterations but will aim to ensure FPS can better draw upon innovative AI solutions to strengthen their cyber security and/or fraud defences to combat the threats now being faced. 

Following a series of engagement with representatives from across the technology and FPS ecosystem, the use case for the AI Innovation Challenge 2024 has been identified. It asks:

 “How can AI prevent online fraud at the earliest possible stage by identifying and tracking fake identities such as synthetic identities and image or audio deepfakes?”

Applications for technology companies will open in June and the sprint will run from September-October 2024. For any questions please contact techinnovationteam@cityoflondon.gov.uk