Deutsche Bank has partnered with payments behemoth Visa to strengthen its online retail fraud prevention resources. The collaboration makes Visa-owned company Cybersource's automated fraud detection system, Decision Manager, available to merchants who process their e-commerce payments via Deutsche. With Decision Manager, merchants will benefit from artificial intelligence-based calculations of risk value for each transaction to discover patterns and strategies. The application leverages an advanced risk model and global data intelligence from billions of data points of the Visa network to block fraudulent transactions and accelerate verified ones. According to Cybersource, Decision Manager prevented the equivalent of more than $22bn in potential fraud worldwide in 2021.

Everywhere you look today, there are examples cropping up of how machine learning is revolutionising different industries. In media and entertainment, Spotify and Netflix sort through billions of data points to find patterns in music, films and television that consumers have enjoyed -- and then make suggestions based on their tastes. In retail, Amazon prompts consumers to buy everything from nappies to office chairs based on shoppers' previous purchases. In finance, machine learning is helping investors anticipate market trends and powering innovations underlying everything from self-driving cars to voice-assistant applications. In the payments industry, machine learning is similarly becoming an increasingly important tool to help businesses combat fraud.

These days it's often proclaimed to be the next big thing in fraud management. The only bit of that you'll find me disagreeing with is the word'next'. Machine learning's been at the heart of the CyberSource approach to fraud management nearly since the beginning of its development. Machine learning underpins fraud scores produced by Decision Manager, our fraud management platform. In this three-part blog series, I'll first provide a quick primer on what machine learning is.