How Machine Learning Combats Payment Fraud PYMNTS.com

Payment fraud evolves in ways that are truly frightening -- and with haste. Fraudsters are continually scrambling to keep up with, and have one foot in front of, technology, with recent stumbling blocks in the form of EMV, in the United States, likely to give rise to greater card-not-present fraud. But the would-be payments criminals have potent weaponry at hand, including ever faster, ever more powerful and ever cheaper computing power, and they have been targeting, according to data science firm Feedzai, the weaker links that exist in the financial services chain. In a recent whitepaper titled "A Primer to Machine Learning for Fraud Management," the firm noted that, even as financial services evolve to embrace a digital world -- with, say, virtual goods in hand and even virtual cash -- the prospects for successful payments malfeasance grow in lockstep. In fact, said Feedzai, as many as 65 percent of firms with annual revenues of at least 1 billion were victims of payments fraud as recently as 2014.