From accountancy to anti-fraud measures, the various technologies that exist under the FinTech umbrella have always deployed the latest innovations. When it comes to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in finance, startups are proving to be every bit as important as the tech giants that dominate the AI space. In Europe, startups up and down the continent are turning to Big Data and machine learning techniques to answer challenges as diverse as the FinTech ecosystem itself. With the global market for AI in FinTech expected to be worth $54 billion by 2032, PYMNTS looks at five European startups that are paving the way. In the realm of accounting software, machine learning is used to automate routine data entry and analysis.

When it comes to deep tech, from AI to big data and AR, Europe is neck and neck with Asia and Silicon Valley. European deep-tech start-ups demonstrate the best opportunities for scaling up. And, according to the recent State of European Tech report, Europe's tech industry is growing five times faster than the rest of the European economy in terms of gross value added, a level that has accelerated in recent years. Last year, our Europe Start-up 100 2018 list looked at various players demonstrating how Europe is gathering momentum in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles (AVs), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), robotics, big data and more. This listing is part of our Europe Start-up 100 series for 2019, which every day this week is focusing on a different list, including fintech and e-commerce, hardware and the internet of things (IoT), and medtech and life sciences start-ups. On Friday (25 January), we will publish our full Europe Start-up 100 list of the ones to watch.

To begin with, we need to understand how artificial intelligence works. If we look back at the analytics in 2017, it's clear that machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to be the next big things. They will let us solve almost any problem, be it writing the lyrics of a song or even curing any disease. We all get curious when we see or hear about new inventions. So are those analytics correct, or just aspirational?

Artificial intelligence (AI) was one of 2017's hottest industry buzzwords as many have begun turning to machines to solve problems that are simply too large for humans to calculate. Once upon a time, AI was an academic pursuit -- but now it has become more affordable and attainable to pursue on a smaller scale, opening it up to use by a variety of companies for a variety of purposes. Feedzai recently told PYMNTS that Big Data paved the way for this shift, and that by 2020, U.S. companies could be saving as much as $60 billion thanks to the help of AI and machine learning. Business management consultancy Accenture expects AI to add $8.3 trillion in economic activity for the U.S. by 2035. It's clear that this trend is building some significant momentum in the payments space and adjacent industries.

Fraugster, a German and Israeli startup that has developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help eliminate payment fraud, has raised $5 million in funding. Earlybird led the round, alongside existing investors Speedinvest, Seedcamp and an unnamed large Swiss family office. The new capital will be used to add to Fraugster's headcount as it expands internationally. Founded in 2014 by Max Laemmle, who previously co-founded payment gateway company Better Payment, and Chen Zamir, who I'm told has spent more than a decade in different analytics and risk management roles including five years at PayPal, Fraugster says it's already handling almost $15 billion in transaction volume for "several thousand" international merchants and payment service providers, including (and most notably) Visa. Its AI-powered fraud detection technology learns from each transaction in real-time and claims to be able to anticipate fraudulent attacks even before they happen. The result is that Fraugster can reduce fraud by 70 per cent while increasing conversion rates by as much as 35 per cent.

Amazon Prime Day (APD) was a huge success, they say. At an estimate 60 percent increase in sales over 2016 and nearly $2 billion in revenue, it's hard to argue otherwise. If you want to talk numbers though, let's consider this. What would you say if you were told that Amazon could lose nearly 5 percent of that revenue, or $100 million, due to fraud? And it's not just Amazon on its Prime Day, it's every online retailer that is exposed to online fraud every single day.

Fraugster, a German and Israeli startup that has developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help eliminate payment fraud, has raised $5 million in funding. Earlybird led the round, alongside existing investors Speedinvest, Seedcamp and an unnamed large Swiss family office. The new capital will be used to add to Fraugster's headcount as it expands internationally. Founded in 2014 by Max Laemmle, who previously co-founded payment gateway company Better Payment, and Chen Zamir, who I'm told has spent more than a decade in different analytics and risk management roles including five years at PayPal, Fraugster says it's already handling almost $15 billion in transaction volume for "several thousand" international merchants and payment service providers, including (and most notably) Visa. Its AI-powered fraud detection technology learns from each transaction in real-time and claims to be able to anticipate fraudulent attacks even before they happen.

Fraugster, the young company that uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to eliminate payment fraud, has raised €4.7 million in funding. The technology learns from each transaction in real-time and can anticipate fraudulent attacks even before they happen. Online merchants lose more than €15 billion to fraudulent transactions every year. Most attempt to tackle this with anti-fraud solutions that are based on outdated technologies. However, older solutions tend to block many sound transactions, leading to false positives that cost the industry over €259 billion in 2015 alone.