In summer 2017, SFU students Karthikeyan Chandrasekaran, Roobini Mathiyazhagan, Ruturaj Patel and Sreenath Vazhayil packed their bags and headed east for what would be an exciting summer co-op at RBC’s Toronto headquarters. They saw an opportunity to participate in the highly competitive Amplify internship at RBC, which received—this year alone—15,000 applications from across the globe for only 64 student positions. What they didn’t know was that they would create an unparalleled approach to fraud detection that would save the company millions of dollars.

The SFU team created a Fraud Early Detection Solution (FrED) for RBC’s contact centre, which they presented at AMP Expo—an event to pitch innovative ideas and solutions to RBC’s top executives. Using real-time machine learning techniques, they solved a fraud detection problem that had challenged RBC.

“After learning from our courses at SFU, we were able to clearly understand RBC’s requirements, and could analyze them to provide the proper solutions to their problems,” said Ruturaj Patel, one of the FrED creators. By understanding the organization’s needs, along with strong mentorship from the Director of Quality Engineering, Domenic Pagniello, the FrED team was able to successfully turn their ideas into action in less than four months.