In the midst of unprecedented volumes of e-commerce since 2020, the number of digital payments made every day around the planet has exploded – hitting about $6.6 trillion in value last year, a 40 percent jump in two years. With all that money flowing through the world's payments rails, there's even more reason for cybercriminals to innovate ways to nab it. To help ensure payments security today requires advanced game theory skills to outthink and outmaneuver highly sophisticated criminal networks that are on track to steal up to $10.5 trillion in "booty" via cybersecurity damages, according to a recent Argus Research report. Payment processors around the globe are constantly playing against fraudsters and improving upon "their game" to protect customers' money. The target invariably moves, and scammers become ever more sophisticated.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rightly being touted as a transformative technology in the near future, with some experts seeing its potential impact comparable to the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. However, huge amounts of money have already been poured into the technology's development to date, reaching over £30 billion last year. From this investment, we're seeing tangible applications of AI in action and its immense influence is already being felt. The pace of change brought by the technology means that in less than a year's time, it is estimated 80% of emerging technologies will be built primarily on AI foundations. In fact, over a third (37%) of organisations have already adopted and deployed AI in some way, according to Gartner.

SafetyPay's platform allows non-card holders and fraud-wary consumers to participate in the online marketplace via bank transfer or cash without sharing their information online. The platform opens the door for e-commerce merchants to tap into a larger consumer base by accepting alternative forms of payment. Meanwhile, Feedzai monitors patterns in payment transaction activity and compares against a customer's historical data to authenticate transactions. With a shared goal of making banking and commerce safe, the partnership with Feedzai enhances SafetyPay's security, harnessing AI to protect customers across borders from fraudulent risks in real-time. "Secure payments have been a core focus for us since SafetyPay was founded more than a decade ago," said Gustavo Ruiz Moya, CEO, SafetyPay.

We just released a new volume of the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report. Included in the report, for the first time, is security data from the Microsoft cloud that reveals how we are leveraging an intelligent security graph to inform how we protect endpoints, better detect attacks and accelerate our response, to help protect our customers. In November we outlined Microsoft's new approach to how we Protect, Detect and Respond to security threats. We have been evolving our ability to get real-time insights and predictive intelligence across our network so we can stay a step ahead of the threats and protect customers. The challenge is to correlate our security data with our threat intelligence data.