WASHINGTON–The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom said they said they are moving forward on prize challenges to accelerate development and adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies, specifically to help tackle the global challenge of financial crime.
“The United Nations estimates that up to $2 trillion of cross-border money laundering takes place each year, financing organized crime and undermining economic prosperity,” the governments said in a statement. “Greater information sharing and collaborative analytics among financial organizations could transform the detection of this activity, but research by the Royal United Services Institute shows it is hindered by the legal, technical and ethical challenges involved in jointly analyzing sensitive information.”
According to the government, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could play a “transformative role” in addressing these financial crimes, which is why they are developing the prize challenges.
Additional Details
The two governments said:
- PETs include maturing technologies, such as federated learning, which allows machine learning models to be trained on high quality datasets collaboratively among organizations, without the data leaving safe environments. Such technologies have the potential to help facilitate privacy-preserving financial information sharing and analytics; allowing suspicious types of behavior to be identified without compromising the privacy of individuals, or requiring the transfer of data between institutions or across borders.
- Through the U.S. and U.K. prize challenges, innovators will develop state-of-the-art privacy-preserving federated learning solutions that help to tackle the barriers to the wider use of these technologies. Research by the Financial Action Task Force has found that uncertainty about the regulatory implications of using these technologies is a significant barrier to adoption. As part of the prize challenges, innovators will be able to engage with regulators, including the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and Information Commissioner’s Office, and the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Challenges Set to Open
The U.S.-UK collaboration on the PETs prize challenges was first announced at the Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Since then, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U.S. National Science Foundation have been working with the UK’s Center for Data Ethics and Innovation and Innovate UK to take the prize challenges forward, the governments said.
The challenges are to open this summer.