Pattern recognition of financial institutions’ payment behavior

Carlos León, Paolo Barucca, Oscar Acero, Gerardo Gage and Fabio Ortega

Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), 2020, vol. 1, issue 1

Abstract: We present a general supervised machine-learning methodology to represent the payment behavior of financial institutions starting from a database of transactions in the Colombian large-value payment system. The methodology learns a feedforward artificial neural network parameterization to represent the payment patterns through 113 features corresponding to financial institutions’ contribution to payments, funding habits, payment timing, payment concentration, centrality in the payment network, and systemic effects due to failure to pay. We then use the representation to compare the coherence of out-of-sample payment patterns of the same institution to its characteristic patterns. The performance is remarkable, with an out-of-sample classification error around three percent. The performance is robust to reductions in the number of features by unsupervised feature selection. In addition, we confirm that network centrality and systemic effect features definitively contribute to enhancing the performance of the methodology. For financial authorities, this is a major step towards the automated detection of individual financial institutions’ anomalous behaviors in payment systems.

Keywords: Payments; Neural networks; Feature selection; Machine learning; Pattern recognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 E42 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Pattern recognition of financial institutions’ payment behavior (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lajcba:v:1:y:2020:i:1:s2666143820300119

DOI: 10.1016/j.latcb.2020.100011

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