FICO: Fraud Detection and Anti-Money Laundering with AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions

In this episode of This is My Architecture, filmed in 2018 on the last day of re:Invent (a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community), FICO lead Software Engineer Sven Ahlfeld talks to AWS Solutions Architect Tom Jones about how the company uses a combination of AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions to architect an on-demand solution for fraud detection and anti-money laundering.

When you think of FICO, you probably thing credit score. And that’s true: founded in 1956, FICO introduced analytic solutions–such as credit scoring–that have made credit more widely available in the US and around the world. As well, the FICO score is the standard measure of consumer risk in the US.

In the video, Sven explains that FICO is making software to meet regulatory compliance goals and requirements, in this case to tackle money laundering. FICO ingests a massive amounts of customer data in the form of financial documents into S3, and then uses S3 to trigger and analyze each document for a number of different fraud and money laundering characteristics.

Key architecture components are designed to be immutable, assuring that the EC2 instances doing the analysis work themselves can’t be compromised and tampered with. But as well, an unchangeable instance can scale very fast and allow for the ability to ingest a large amount of documents. It can also scale back when there is less demand. The immutable images also support regulatory requirements for the various needs and regulations of localities around the world.

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