The newly announced collaboration between email risk assessment innovator Emailage and fraud prevention and risk management firm Featurespace is designed to combat online application fraud, a problem that grew by 159% last year according to U.K. Finance.

The partnership integrates Featurespace’s ARIC Fraud Hub with Emailage’s data and risk assessment scores. The combined solution identifies and reports application fraud in real time, boosting the accuracy of customer authentication during processes like onboarding and account maintenance. The integration will also make it easier for institutions to comply with the latest payment regulations.

“In order to keep up with the fast-changing payment landscape, we are always on the lookout to leverage our expertise and that of other providers,” Chief Partnership Officer at Emailage Tim White said. “Emailage and Featurespace are two companies moving in the same direction in terms of innovation and growth. Therefore, we felt this collaboration was a highly strategic opportunity.”

“This is yet another step in our journey to provide our customers with full regulatory compliance and a best-in-class solution,” White said.

Emailage turns email addresses into global digital identifiers. The company leverages a worldwide data network to assess the likelihood that the individual who provided the email address is reliable as a potential customer or applicant. Via the integration, digital identities that are established by Emailage are then processed by the Adaptive Behavioral Analytics of Featurespace’s ARIC platform, which builds individual behavioral profiles. This improves the ability of the machine learning models to automatically detect risk and to combat new threats as they develop. Emailage noted that it has helped organizations around the world mitigate $2.8 billion in fraudulent purchases and applications.

“This integration makes it easy for all of our customers to leverage the combined power of our innovative Adaptive Behavioral Analytics and Emailage’s proprietary data set to improve risk scoring and reduce exposure to sophisticated online threats at the point of application,” Featurespace CEO Martina King said.

Founded in 2008, Featurespace demonstrated its ARIC Fraud Manager solution at FinovateFall 2016. The company’s partnership announcement with Emailage comes at the same time as a report that banking and payments solutions provider Contis has completed deployment of Featurespace’s ARIC Fraud Hub.

In June, Featurespace announced that it would power transaction monitoring for Ireland’s Permanent TSB. This spring, the company was highlighted by Aite Group in its 2019 report on anti-fraud and AML machine learning platform vendors, and its CEO was profiled by Hypepotamus on the topic of workplace diversity.

Earlier this year, Featurespace announced a partnership with retail finance technology provider Deko, and launched its technology in Singapore. The company began 2019 with a major fundraising, bringing in $32.3 million (£25 million) in new capital in a round led by Insight Venture Partners.

Emailage demonstrated its Browser Extension at its Finovate debut in 2015. The extension marks email with an easily identifiable icon that enables users to get an instant analysis on the risk associated with the email. With the extension, users of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer can leverage Emailage’s fraud-detecting technology to assess the risk of emails and websites.

Emailage won Best E-commerce Initiative at the PayTech Awards in London last month. This spring, the company introduced a trio of new points of presence in Singapore, Australia, and Germany, in what company CTO Rafael Loureiro said demonstrated the company’s “strategic commitment” to making its technology available worldwide. An office in Dublin, Ireland, was opened in June.

Emailage also announced it added a “big four” U.S. bank, a major Asian payment platform, and a global e-commerce solution provider to its shared intelligence network in the first quarter of this year. Founded in 2012, the company has raised $15.7 million in funding from investors including Anthos Capital, Cobre Capital, and Mucker Capital. Rei Carvalho is CEO.