Normalisation of SWIFT Message Counterparties with Feature Extraction and Clustering

Short text clustering is a known use case in the text analytics community. When the structure and content falls in the natural language domain e.g. Twitter posts or instant messages, then natural language techniques can be used, provided texts are of sufficient length to allow for use of (pre)trained models to extract meaningful information, such as part-of-speech or topic annotations. However, natural language models are not suitable for clustering transaction counterparties, as they are found in bank payment messaging systems, such as SWIFT. The manually typed tags are typically physical or legal entity details, which lack sentence structure, while containing all the variations and noise that manual entry introduces. This leaves a gap in an investigator or counter-fraud professional's toolset when looking to augment their knowledge of payment flow originator and beneficiary entities and trace funds and assets. A gap that vendors traditionally try to close with fuzzy matching tools. With these considerations in mind, we are proposing a hybrid string similarity, topic modelling, hierarchical clustering and rule-based pipeline to facilitate clustering of transaction counterparties, also catering for unknown number of expected clusters. We are also devising metrics to supplement the evaluation of the approach, based on the well-known measures of precision and recall. Testing on a real-life labelled dataset demonstrates significantly improved performance over a baseline rule-based ('keyword') approach. The approach retains most of the interpretability found in rule-based systems, as the former adds an additional level of cluster refinement to the latter. The resulting workflow reduces the need for manual review. When only a subset of the population needs to be investigated, such as in sanctions investigations, the approach allows for better control of the risks of missing entity variations.