The Dirty Truth About Financial Data Nobody Talks About Before Building AI Models

I spent three weeks cleaning payment data before writing a single line of model code. Here’s what I learned. Everyone wants to talk about the fancy part, the model architecture, the accuracy scores, the deployment pipeline. Nobody wants to talk about the 72 hours you’ll spend staring at a CSV file wondering why 40% of your transaction are in four different time zones with no documentation explaining why. That’s the real job.