Cambridge, U.K.-based Featurespace will bring its adaptive behavioral analytic technology to Mercadotecnia Ideas y Tecnologia (Marketing, Ideas, and Technology) also known as MIT, a leading payments processing specialist based in Mexico. Featurespace’s technology will be used to provide real-time transaction monitoring for merchants to help stop fraud and reduce the number of chargebacks and false alerts.
“This is a great example of how our machine learning technology can be seamlessly integrated into systems across any geography,” Featurespace CEO Martina King said in a press release. MIT CEO Juan Carlos Viramontes added that Featurespace’s approach to fighting fraud using adaptive behavioral analytics was a major factor in choosing the company as a partner. “The growth in fraud, as well as the sophisticated forms that attacks take, forces payments ecosystem participants to seek innovative and disruptive solutions to reduce fraud and make manual process more efficient, without sacrificing customer experience” Viramontes said.
Pictured: Featurespace Commercial Director Matt Mills demonstrating the ARIC Fraud Manager at FinovateFall 2016.
MIT will leverage Featurespace’s ARIC platform to spot anomalous behavior in individual transactions, leading to better fraud detection, fewer false alerts, and higher transaction acceptance. The firm serves more than 17,000 merchants at more than 80,000 points of sale in Mexico. Founded in 2004, MIT has processed 500 million transactions since inception and currently facilitates 10 million transactions a month.
Discussing the origins of Featurespace during the company’s demo at last September at FinovateFall, Commercial Director Matt Mills highlighted a pair of two key breakthroughs in understanding human behavior and in anomaly detection at the cornerstone of the platform’s development. The combination of these two insights has led to a solution, he said, that is not only sensitive enough to spot credit card fraud, but is also able to identify patterns in behavior that distinguish a regular recreational slot machine player in a casino from the gambling addict two machines away. Mills added that the technology’s “deep understanding of behavior” enabled it to “spot subtle signals” that a response or behavior, for example, may have been given under duress.
Earlier this month, Featurespace and TSYS unveiled an anti-fraud solution, Foresight Score. A member of FinTechCity’s Fintech 50 for 2017, Featurespace teamed up with digital family banking solution goHenry in April, partnered with merchant payment solutions provider CashFlows in March, and in February began working with fellow Finovate alum Icon Solutions to bring greater fraud protection to Icon’s Instant Payment Framework. With customers including William Hill and fellow Finovate alum TSYS, Featurespace closed a successful venture round led by Nesta Ventures in June, bringing the company’s total capital to more than $22 million (£16.4 million).