Selected Papers from the 1st International Online Conference on Risk and Financial Management

A special issue of Journal of Risk and Financial Management (ISSN 1911-8074). This special issue belongs to the section "Risk".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 799

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

I want to offer a warm welcome to all conference participants of the 1st International Online Conference on Risk and Financial Management—Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning in Finance (IOCRF2025), which will take place virtually over two days from 17 to 18 June 2025. The conference is sponsored by MDPI and the JRFM (Journal of Risk and Financial Management), a peer-reviewed, open access journal that focuses on risk management and all areas of empirical finance, management, and applied financial economics.

This conference will feature sessions on the following topics:
· Machine learning in economics and finance;
· AI in economics and finance;
· AI in financial reporting and auditing;
· Financial innovations and technology;
· Future of money: central bank digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins.

This event will be held entirely online, allowing participants from all over the world to participate without concerns regarding travel and related expenditures. This conference format is particularly appropriate and useful because research concerned with AI and big data applications in empirical finance is progressing rapidly. An electronic conference provides a platform for rapid and direct exchanges about the latest research findings and novel ideas.

Participation in, as well as attendance of this online conference, is free. Participants will have the opportunity to examine, explore, and critically engage with issues and advances in these areas. We hope to facilitate discussions and exchanges within the community.

Outstanding contributions from each session will be eligible for conference awards. Moreover, instead of limiting presentations to a live poster session, all IOCRF2025 participants have the opportunity to upload and display their research in the form of a poster at the poster gallery on the conference website. Therefore, all participants with poster submissions for the poster gallery are now eligible for awards! Please click HERE for more instructions on poster and oral submissions.

Lastly, we would like to express our sincere gratitude for your unwavering support and participation, and to wish this conference every success.

Prof. Dr. Thanasis Stengos
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Risk and Financial Management is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • risk management
  • financial management
  • predictive modeling
  • financial technology
  • quantitative risk analysis
  • algorithmic trading
  • financial forecasting
  • economic modeling
  • big data
  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

18 pages, 860 KiB  
Article
Disruption in Southern Africa’s Money Laundering Activity by Artificial Intelligence Technologies
by Michael Masunda and Haresh Barot
J. Risk Financial Manag. 2025, 18(8), 441; https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm18080441 - 7 Aug 2025
Viewed by 362
Abstract
The rise in illicit financial activities across the South Africa–Zimbabwe corridor, with an estimated annual loss of $3.1 billion demands advanced AI solutions to augment traditional detection methods. This study introduces FALCON, a groundbreaking hybrid transformer–GNN model that integrates temporal transaction analysis (TimeGAN) [...] Read more.
The rise in illicit financial activities across the South Africa–Zimbabwe corridor, with an estimated annual loss of $3.1 billion demands advanced AI solutions to augment traditional detection methods. This study introduces FALCON, a groundbreaking hybrid transformer–GNN model that integrates temporal transaction analysis (TimeGAN) and graph-based entity mapping (GraphSAGE) to detect illicit financial flows with unprecedented precision. By leveraging data from South Africa’s FIC, Zimbabwe’s RBZ, and SWIFT, FALCON achieved 98.7%, surpassing Random Forest (72.1%) and human auditors (64.5%), while reducing false positives to 1.2% (AUC-ROC: 0.992). Tested on 1.8 million transactions, including falsified CTRs, STRs, and Ethereum blockchain data, FALCON uncovered $450 million laundered by 23 shell companies with a cross-border detection precision of 94%, directly mitigating illicit financial flows in Southern Africa. For regulators, FALCON met FAFT standards, yielding 92% court admissibility, and its GDPR-compliant design (ε = 1.2 differential privacy) met stringent legal standards. Deployed on AWS Graviton3, FALCON processed 2 million transactions/second at $0.002 per 1000 transactions, demonstrating real-time scalability, making it cost-effective for financial institutions in emerging markets. As the first AI framework tailored for Southern Africa’s financial ecosystems, FALCON sets a new benchmark for ethical AML solutions in emerging economies with immediate applicability to CBDC supervision. The transparent validation of publicly available data underscores its potential to transform global financial crime detection. Full article
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