Mastercard harnesses gen AI to detect fraud

Mastercard is adopting new generative AI technology to enhance fraud detection and better protect consumers.

Mastercard’s real-time decisioning solution ‘Decision Intelligence’ (DI) already helps banks to score and safely approve 143 billion transactions a year.

According to Mastercard, its new generative AI technology will scan an “unprecedented” one trillion data points to predict whether a transaction is likely to be genuine or not.

‘Decision Intelligence Pro’, available from later this year, assesses the relationships between multiple entities surrounding a transaction in order to determine its risk and, in under 50 milliseconds, the technology is able to improve the overall DI “score”.

Mastercard pointed to initial modelling which has shown that fraud detection rates are boosted by 20%, on average, and by as much as 300% in some cases, as a result of these generative AI techniques.

“With generative AI we are transforming the speed and accuracy of our anti-fraud solutions, deflecting the efforts of criminals, and protecting banks and their customers,” said Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard.

“Supercharging our algorithm will improve our ability to anticipate the next potential fraudulent event, instilling trust into every interaction.”

The improvements to DI will help banks to mitigate false positives, defined by Mastercard as “legitimate transactions which are incorrectly flagged as fraudulent ones”.

Bhalla added: “The precision of the solution – achieved by scanning potential points of sale in real time – has been shown in our own analysis to not only increase accuracy, but also reduce the number of false positives by more than 85%.”

The Finastra ‘Financial Services: State of the Nation Survey 2023’ published last November reported a growing interest in and use of AI, with 37% of respondents stating that their financial institution had improved or deployed AI technology in the past 12 months, up from 30% in 2022.

The latest edition of the survey also examined how banks and financial institutions intend to use AI, with many considering it a means to meet increased customer expectations for personalised services.

Further reading: Open Banking and AI – a new era of personalised banking?