Multi-Stream Temporal Fusion for Financial Fraud Detection

Abstract

Financial fraud detection in digital banking requires reasoning over multiple heterogeneous event streams -- transactions, login sessions, risk signals -- that individually appear benign but collectively reveal fraudulent patterns. We propose the Multi-Stream Fraud Transformer (MSFT), a unified architecture that encodes each event stream with independent Transformer encoders and fuses their representations through configurable mechanisms. We conduct a systematic ablation study comparing five fusion strategies: concatenation, gated fusion, time-aware positional encoding, cross-stream attention, and a full combination. On a large-scale dataset (10M users, 1.5% fraud rate) with 85M parameter models, we demonstrate that (1) sequence models significantly outperform gradient-boosted trees operating on aggregated features (0.74 vs. 0.99 AUROC), (2) per-stream encoding is essential -- a single-stream Transformer baseline with matched parameter budget reaches only 0.82 AUROC, an 18-point gap that confirms the multi-stream inductive bias is necessary, (3) time-aware positional encoding achieves the highest discrimination (0.9961 AUROC), (4) gated fusion yields the best precision (0.989) suitable for production deployment, and (5) the risk event stream provides the strongest individual signal contribution. We further validate on proprietary production data from a digital banking platform, showing over 22% relative AUROC improvement over the XGBoost baseline.