With hundreds of thousands of decisions to make every second of every day, Mastercard depends on its AI-powered Decision Management Platform to detect fraud and other irregularities. Brighterion is proud of building the AI engine leveraged by that award-winning technology.

While many fintech platforms focus on risk assessment, Brighterion has been solely dedicated to AI-powered decisioning for more than 20 years. With a sharp focus on financial irregularities, Brighterion’s AI decision-making algorithms provide real-time detection in transaction fraud, healthcare fraud, waste and abuse, and money laundering (AML).

The role of artificial intelligence is taking top billing in the search for software that detects fraud and credit risk. Legacy solutions like rules-based decisioning are hard-pressed to stay ahead of bad actors as fraud evolves and becomes more sophisticated. Machine learning rises to the top for its ability to learn from complex and widely varied data. This may include the usual behavior associated with each account, typical behavior for certain transaction types and locations of users. When anomalies are detected, they are flagged and scored for investigation. Machine learning adds those “good” and “bad” behaviors to the algorithms for future reference as each decision is updated.

When built properly, AI-powered decisioning solutions instantly analyze thousands of data points to provide results in real time. The great benefit for customer organizations is they can see instant results knowing a trained model reduces false positives substantially.

For example, our customer Worldpay is the largest acquirer in the world, processing transaction payments for merchants. After less than two months of training the AI model on their historical data, Worldpay launched with 20 times fewer false positives than with their previous detection solution.  Simultaneously, Worldpay’s fraud detection rate increased by over three times.

The Brighterion-Mastercard AI success story

With so many platforms focused only on risk assessment, Mastercard recognized the need for a more comprehensive solution for rising financial fraud. Mastercard wanted to speed up decision-making and detect fraud in an environment that would learn from findings to reduce genuine transactions from being declined.

Mastercard’s quest brought them to Brighterion, and the two companies partnered to integrate Brighterion’s AI into the Decision Management Platform (DMP).

CIO 100 AwardTIn 2022, CIO magazine named Mastercard a CIO 100 Award winner for its innovative solution that provides protection for its own companies and is used by thousands of leading issuing banks, acquirers, merchants and solutions customers, including organizations outside of the Mastercard ecosystem.

The DMP team uses this innovative technology to ensure business needs are met in real time without disruption. The platform enables business agility in launching products through the automation of high-volume decisions on transactions, delivering products and solutions at scale.

“We are thankful to the Brighterion team for their strong partnership and industry-leading AI that provides a key strategic differentiator for the DMP products such as Decision Intelligence,” says John Chisholm, Senior Vice President of Mastercard’s Decision Management Program.

Confirmed results of Mastercard’s AI decisioning platform

Mastercard has blocked $55 billion in confirmed fraud since the decision platform launched in 2017. Another important consideration is the impact of false declines and false positives. With our world increasingly online this year, customers are looking for frictionless interactions that approve authentic transactions. After all, false declines often mean lost sales. We also know friction, false declines and lost sales mean more than immediate lost revenue.

According to the More Than Accountants blog:

  • The probability of successfully selling products to existing customers is higher than to a new prospect. It is 60 to 70 percent for loyal customers, and 5 to 20 percent for new prospects.
  • Bringing new prospects up to the same level of a loyal customer can cost 16 times more.
  • 80 percent of future profit will come from just a fifth of your loyal customers
  • Increasing customer retention by 2 percent lowers costs by as much as 10 percent.
  • Profit can increase between 25 to 95 percent just by increasing customer retention by 5 percent.

The tangible benefits of DMP

The DMP powers more than 20 different products and incorporates thousands of business rules, running every transaction through multiple AI models in parallel, that are calculated in tens of milliseconds. A sample of the products developed are:

  • Safety Net – Prevents catastrophic fraud against our customers.
  • Fraud Rules Manager – Enables customers to implement over 450 rule changes per week to keep up with rapidly changing fraud activity.
  • Stand-In – Provides on-behalf decisioning for customer banks in the event of system outages.
  • Consumer Controls – Provides ability for cardholders to set controls, e.g. limits on how the account is used, such as budget controls limit to set monthly spending on entertainment.
  • Decision Intelligence – Provides industry-leading fraud detection. Our customers report a 30 percent improvement in fraud detection while reducing false positives by more than 60 percent.

Innovation is needed in changing times

The CIO award is for innovation in IT, ranging from improving customer experience and optimizing processes to creating advantages for customers and helping them improve profitability.

Kudos to the DMP team who built Brighterion AI into the Mastercard decisioning platform. It’s a winning combination.

Learn more about Brighterion’s AI platform to learn how we can help to address your organization’s challenges.