Mastercard and Feedzai Team to Fight AI-Powered Scams

Mastercard has teamed with financial crime prevention company Feedzai to help financial institutions prevent scams.

“As payments continue to evolve, fraudsters are increasingly using AI to scam consumers,” the companies said in a news release Tuesday (Feb. 18). “This cost more than $1 trillion last year, with more than 50% of consumers saying they had encountered a scam at least once a week.”

To that end, Mastercard will leverage Feedzai’s fraud platform, available in more than 90 countries, to deploy its Consumer Fraud Risk (CFR) solution to customers across many key markets around the world.

According to the release, CFR provides sending and receiving financial institutions in account-to-account payment transactions with intelligence to spot and prevent scams in real time. Since going live in the U.K. in 2023, the value of authorized push payment (APP) scams has fallen by more than 12% in that country.

Feedzai’s AI-native Financial Crime Prevention Platform, the release adds, is used by leading financial institutions to protect more than a billion consumers worldwide, and upwards of $8 trillion in transactions each year.

“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.”

PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that scams became the leading form of fraud last year, ahead of digital payment fraud. The share of scam-related fraud rose by 56%, and financial losses from scams increased 121%. Scams now make up 23% of all fraudulent transactions, with relationship/trust and product/service scams generating the most losses.

“These scams manipulate individuals into authorizing fraudulent transactions, often using deceptive tactics,” PYMNTS wrote. “Additionally, fraud involving compromised credentials, where individuals are tricked into revealing account details, is also on the rise.”

Additional research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that many financial institutions (FIs) are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to detect fraud.

“These technologies analyze large amounts of transaction data in real time, spotting suspicious activity and preventing fraudulent payments before they are completed,” PYMNTS wrote late last year.

The research found that 71% of FIs are using AI and ML for fraud detection, up from 66% in 2023. These technologies can identify anomalies and patterns that might not be detected by human analysts, allowing banks to perform quicker decision-making.