Mas­ter­card and Feedzai, an AI so­lu­tion provider in fi­nan­cial crime pre­ven­tion, yes­ter­day an­nounced that they are join­ing forces to make it eas­i­er for more banks to iden­ti­fy and stop scams, pro­tect­ing con­sumers and busi­ness­es glob­al­ly. 

In a news re­lease yes­ter­day, Mas­ter­card said as pay­ments con­tin­ue to evolve, fraud­sters are in­creas­ing­ly us­ing AI to scam con­sumers.  

“This cost more than US$1 tril­lion last year, with more than 50 per cent of con­sumers say­ing they had en­coun­tered a scam at least once a week. Mas­ter­card is con­tin­u­ous­ly in­vest­ing in cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy and strength­en­ing part­ner­ships to help pre­vent scams at each stage of the life­cy­cle – from ac­count open­ing – to the point the trans­ac­tion is made,” the re­lease said. 

It not­ed that lever­ag­ing the glob­al avail­abil­i­ty of Feedzai’s ad­vanced fraud plat­form, which cur­rent­ly helps pro­tect con­sumers and fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in over 90 coun­tries, the com­pa­nies will ex­pe­dite de­ploy­ing Mas­ter­card’s Con­sumer Fraud Risk (CFR) so­lu­tion to cus­tomers across many key mar­kets glob­al­ly. 

In ac­count-to-ac­count pay­ments, Mas­ter­card said CFR pro­vides both the send­ing and the re­ceiv­ing fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion with in­tel­li­gence to help de­tect and pre­vent scams in re­al-time. Since it went live in the UK in 2023, da­ta from the coun­try’s Pay­ment Sys­tems Reg­u­la­tor (PSR) shows that the val­ue of au­tho­rised push pay­ment (APP) scams has re­duced by over 12 per cent. 

"With more than half the world’s pop­u­la­tion af­fect­ed, the scale of scam fraud is not on­ly hav­ing a dev­as­tat­ing im­pact on con­sumers, but al­so sur­pass­ing the GDP of many in­di­vid­ual economies,” said Jo­han Ger­ber, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, head of Se­cu­ri­ty So­lu­tions at Mas­ter­card.

"To­geth­er with Feedzai’s glob­al plat­form, we will scale our first-of-its-kind scams so­lu­tion to more mar­kets, help­ing more fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions com­bat fi­nan­cial crime faster than be­fore," he said. 

Lead­ing fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions al­ready use Feedzai’s AI-na­tive Fi­nan­cial Crime Pre­ven­tion Plat­form to pro­tect over a bil­lion con­sumers glob­al­ly, and more than US$8 tril­lion in trans­ac­tions every year. 

“We are ex­cit­ed to ex­pand our part­ner­ship with Mas­ter­card to ad­dress es­ca­lat­ing fi­nan­cial crime threats,” said Nuno Se­bas­tiao, CEO of Feedzai. “The ex­po­nen­tial growth in scams un­der­scores the ur­gency for fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions to adopt AI-based, re­al-time so­lu­tions. We’re ex­cit­ed to be work­ing to­geth­er with Mas­ter­card to help bring the proven val­ue of its CFR score to new mar­kets for the first time.” 

Feedzai’s plat­form analy­ses every dig­i­tal trans­ac­tion—from card pur­chas­es to re­al-time trans­fers—for mul­ti­ple risk sig­nals in re­al time. By in­te­grat­ing de­vice in­tel­li­gence, net­work da­ta, and be­hav­ioral bio­met­rics, Feedzai AI iden­ti­fies sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ty as it hap­pens so fraud can be stopped in re­al time be­fore any mon­ey is lost. 

"The glob­al epi­dem­ic of fraud and scams has cre­at­ed a press­ing need for in­no­v­a­tive tech­nol­o­gy so­lu­tions. In the face of this rapid­ly ris­ing threat, fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions should con­sid­er third-par­ty da­ta as an es­sen­tial part of their strat­e­gy for fraud de­fense," said Julie Con­roy, Chief In­sights Of­fi­cer, of Datos In­sights. "By build­ing on Mas­ter­card's proven CFR score and ex­tend­ing it glob­al­ly, this part­ner­ship de­liv­ers a pow­er­ful com­bi­na­tion – Mas­ter­card's glob­al da­ta ex­per­tise and Feedzai's pur­pose-built risk scor­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties." 

Just last week the Trinidad and To­ba­go Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion (TTSEC) warned the pub­lic about emerg­ing in­vest­ment scam trends and pat­terns in T&T.

The TTSEC stat­ed it has ob­served scam­mers de­vel­op­ing new tac­tics to de­fraud in­di­vid­u­als.

It said,"Based on its mar­ket sur­veil­lance ac­tiv­i­ties, the TTSEC ad­vis­es the pub­lic to re­main vig­i­lant for the fol­low­ing signs, char­ac­ter­is­tics, and evolv­ing tac­tics used by scam­mers such as fake pro­files and false promis­es made on so­cial me­dia plat­forms.