A largely Irving-based team has patented a system that uses AI to help New York-based banking giant Citibank fight financial crime.

The company, which has a large corporate office in Las Colinas, received a utility patent for systems and methods to draft suspicious activity reports using large language models. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office made the award Sept. 22. The patent took 666 days from its application in November 2024 to grant.

Using AI to handle fraud reports

Suspicious activity reports, known as SARs, are documents financial institutions must file with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network when they detect transactions that may involve money laundering or fraud. The traditional process for preparing SARs is often time-consuming and prone to human error, Citibank explained in the background section of the patent application.

“Often, there are many false positives and, according to certain research findings, as few as 4% of total SAR filing warrant a follow-up from law enforcement,” the patent says.

To improve the process, Citibank’s newly patented systems and methods use artificial intelligence to identify relevant information and incorporate it into SARs. According to the patent, the system pulls data about a transaction or other event from a customer’s device and from internal databases. When the event’s fraud risk score crosses a reporting threshold, a prompt generator turns that data into instructions for a large language model, which then produces a machine-readable SAR.

The patent lists five people from Irving among its six inventors. Brett Pickard, Deepali Tuteja, Girish Wali, Prasanth Babu Madakasira Ramakrishna and Saketh Ram Gurumurthi, all of Irving, worked on the technology with Miriam Silver of Tel Aviv.

Other patents the week of Sept. 22

The Citibank SAR system patent was one of 106 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued with ties to North Texas the week of Sept. 22. That volume meant the region ranked No. 9 out of 250 U.S. metros for patent activity.

Texas Instruments (Dallas) received the most patents for the week, with 10. Other companies with notable patent awards include:

Actuate Therapeutics (Fort Worth) won a patent for the solid forms of a compound that matches the name of a cancer drug the company has in development.

Traxxas (McKinney) received two design patents for parts used in its radio-controlled vehicles. One is a model vehicle bumper. The other is a side pod light. Four of its inventors were listed on both patents, ranking them among the region’s top inventors for the week. They are: Adam Cole Ewing of McKinney, Kent Poteet of Lucas, Otto Karl Allmendinger of Rowlett and Randy Perez of McKinney.

USAA (San Antonio) received three patents involving local inventors. One patent covers systems for deploying autonomous vehicles that can provide service in an area affected by a catastrophic event that makes regular travel difficult. Another is related to online payment security, and a third involves wearable devices.

Verily Health (Dallas), which raised a $300 million investment round in March, received a patent for a medical imaging masking model that visualizes uncertainty in image-to-image reconstruction.

Patent information is provided by Joe Chiarella, founder of patent analytics company Patent Index and publisher of The Inventiveness Index. For additional details on the patents granted below, search the USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database.