An independent home for research on trust in digital finance.
The Centre for Financial Crime & AI is a research institute based in Hyderabad, India. We study financial crime, responsible AI and digital trust, and work to make sure what we learn reaches the people who can act on it.
The gap between what's known and what's done.
Most of what the industry knows about fraud lives inside individual institutions: in case files, model logs and the heads of investigators. Very little of it becomes shared, tested knowledge.
Digital finance has brought hundreds of millions of people into the formal economy. It has also created new ways to deceive them, at a scale and speed that no single organisation can address alone. Banks see their own customers. Platforms see their own users. Regulators see aggregated reports, often months later.
Artificial intelligence raises the stakes on both sides. It gives defenders better detection, and it gives criminals cheaper, more convincing ways to impersonate, persuade and forge. Meanwhile, the AI systems institutions deploy to make decisions about people need governance that is still being worked out.
CFCAI was created to sit in that gap: a neutral, rigorous place where evidence about financial crime and AI can be gathered, tested and shared, and translated into guidance that practitioners and policymakers can use.
Generate independent, practical evidence that makes digital finance safer and more trustworthy for everyone who uses it.
A digital financial system in which people can transact with confidence, and in which AI strengthens that confidence rather than eroding it.
Practitioner depth, research discipline.
CFCAI is led by people who have built and run fraud and risk functions inside large financial institutions, and who now want that experience to serve the wider ecosystem.
Close to operations
We understand how alerts, investigations and controls work in practice, so our recommendations are deployable.
Rigorous with data
Transparent methods, careful handling of sensitive data, and honesty about the limits of what the evidence shows.
Fluent in policy
We frame findings so they can inform regulation, standards and supervisory practice, not just internal decks.
Focused on outcomes
The measure of our work is reduced harm and better decisions, not citation counts.
How we protect our credibility.
Independence is the asset partners are paying for. These commitments apply to every engagement.
Editorial control stays with CFCAI
Partners and funders can propose questions and review drafts for factual accuracy and confidentiality. They cannot change findings, suppress conclusions or approve what we publish.
We disclose who funds us
Every publication states who funded or supported the work. We maintain a public list of institutional supporters.
We don't sell products
CFCAI does not build, resell or endorse commercial fraud or AI products. We don't rank vendors, and we don't accept fees in exchange for favourable coverage.
Data is handled with care
Where we work with sensitive data, we use data-minimisation, aggregation and privacy-preserving techniques, under written agreements that comply with applicable data protection law, including India's DPDP Act.
Conflicts are declared
Researchers declare relevant affiliations and interests. Where a conflict could reasonably affect a project, the researcher steps back from it.
Why Hyderabad?
Hyderabad sits at the centre of India's financial technology, banking-operations and AI talent base. That makes it a natural place to study how digital finance works, and how to keep it safe, at scale.