Jason Blackhurst to Succeed Featurespace CEO Martina King After Visa Acquisition

Featurespace, a provider of global fraud and financial crime solutions, announced a leadership change following its acquisition by Visa.

CEO Martina King will retire and be succeeded by Jason Blackhurst, who will take on the role of senior vice president, head of Featurespace and acceptance risk solutions at Visa, Featurespace said in a Monday (March 31) press release.

During her 12 years as Featurespace’s CEO, King led the firm from its early stages to its current position as a leader in machine learning-powered fraud detection and a Visa solution, according to the release. Featurespace’s technology is now used by 100,000 businesses and processes 100 billion payment events per year.

Blackhurst has been senior vice president of innovation and strategic partnership at Visa for 10 years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he had roles at Bank of America, Vesta, Polestar Communications and Concentrex.

Blackhurst will relocate from the United States to the United Kingdom, where Featurespace is securing a six-year lease at its current head office in Cambridge and continuing its longstanding ties to the University of Cambridge, per the release.

“I am excited to build upon Featurespace’s strong foundations and drive further innovation in the rapidly evolving fraud prevention landscape,” Blackhurst said in the release. “I have been inspired by how deeply the team thinks about problems and solutions under Martina’s leadership and hope to continue that legacy.”

James Mirfin, senior vice president, global head of risk and identity solutions at Visa, said in the release: “If you’re going to solve dynamic problems, you need dynamic leadership and relationships — and Featurespace has built that over the past 12 years. Jason’s vision will be invaluable as we continue to deliver cutting-edge fraud prevention solutions to our clients globally.”

Visa announced its plan to acquire Featurespace in September and completed the acquisition in December. The company said at the time that Featurespace’s business will become part of Visa’s Risk and Identity Solutions unit and that its products will be woven into Visa’s offering to expand on its fraud prevention solutions and use cases.

Also in December, Featurespace was granted a U.S. patent for its adaptive behavioral analytics technology, an artificial intelligence-driven technology that improves fraud detection and prevents real-time scams.

The human element can often be the most vulnerable yet potentially under-addressed aspect of financial scams, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “How Scammers Tailor Financial Scams to Individual Consumer Vulnerabilities.”