AFC Digital Hub

AFC Digital Hub’s mission is to counter increasingly sophisticated financial crimes through innovative solutions based on artificial intelligence, enabled by close cooperation between scientific and financial partners.

The main activities of AFC Digital Hub include:

The governance of AFC Digital Hub is designed to ensure efficiency, innovation and operational continuity. The Board of Directors defines strategic guidelines and oversees activities, while the General Manager coordinates their operational implementation.

There are four core operational areas: Partnership & Research (management of relationships with scientific partners and dissemination activities), AFC Models & Expertise (definition of priorities and validation of initiatives), Engineering (engineering and optimization of prototypes), and Planning, Governance & Controls (strategic planning and organizational control).

The Consortium’s governance structure is completed by the Steering Committee and the Scientific Advisory Board.
The Steering Committee is the technical–managerial body with advisory and consultative functions, supporting the Board of Directors in the planning, management and monitoring of activities. It also serves as a liaison between the General Management, operational units and scientific partners.
The Scientific Advisory Board ensures the scientific and quality of the activities. Composed of experts from the scientific partners and a representative of Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, it supports the Steering Committee and promotes scientific dissemination initiatives.

AFC Digital Hub develops strategic projects known as “challenges”, aimed at strengthening safeguards against financial crime and fostering technological innovation.

Challenges fall into two categories: functional, focused on efficiently detecting suspicious behavior, and enabling, which introduce technologies and models that support the development and use of artificial intelligence in the AFC domain.

Research areas include transaction monitoring, alert classification algorithms, entity resolution tools and anomaly detection techniques. Enabling challenges involve experimentation with federated learning, explainable AI (XAI), synthetic data and development on anonymized datasets.
The adopted approach integrates scientific research, technological development and industrial application, with the goal of generating concrete and replicable solutions. AFC Digital Hub has also taken part in a pilot public–private collaboration project involving institutional bodies and supervisory authorities, aimed at exploring synergies in the fight against financial crime.

AFC Digital Hub promotes the dissemination of its research results through internationally recognized scientific publications. Contributions address key topics in the fight against financial crime, such as transaction network analysis, anomaly detection, counterparty disambiguation and the explainability of artificial intelligence algorithms.
These publications are developed in collaboration with universities and research centers and are presented at leading conferences such as ECML PKDD, IEEE Big Data, the ACM Web Conference and the World Conference on Explainable AI.

Each study is linked to a specific challenge developed by AFC Digital Hub, demonstrating the scientific and operational impact of the proposed solutions. Recent works include FlowSeries, for financial flow analysis; Weirdnodes, for anomaly detection in temporal networks; and Explainability Quantified, for the comparative evaluation of XAI techniques.

This scientific output strengthens the Hub’s role as a bridge between academic research and industrial application, contributing to the growth of an innovative and responsible ecosystem.

AFC Digital Hub organizes and participates in national and international events focused on innovation and on the fight against financial crime, with the aim of fostering debate, spreading a culture of innovation and promoting an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to combating financial crime.

Anti Financial Crime Digital Hub S.c.a.r.l. is a company within the Intesa Sanpaolo Group.

The Hub is always open to new synergies with academic, institutional, and business organizations interested in contributing to the development of innovative solutions to combat financial crime. For information, collaborations, or specific requests, you can contact the team via the email address listed below.

Registered and operational headquarters:
C.so Inghilterra, 3 – 10138 Turin (TO)

Email: pgc@afcdigitalhub.com