It seems you can never have enough technology resources. Mastercard announced plans to acquire machine learning and AI tech firm Brighterion. As the follow article reports, this adds to Mastercard’s recent addition of fraud management solutions firm NuData Security.
Financial services firm MasterCard (MA) has announced an agreement to acquire Brighterion for an undisclosed amount.
Brighterion has developed machine learning and AI technologies that assist payment processors in identifying consumer purchasing patterns.
The deal for Brighterion is in addition to MasterCard’s recent acquisition of NuData Security, and signals management’s imperative to shore up the financial network’s security capabilities in the face of evolving threats.
San Francisco-based Brighterion was founded in 1999 to develop a portfolio of capabilities to analyze risk and decisioning processes in order to prevent or reduce fraud, credit risk, and chargebacks in real-time.
Management is headed by CEO Dr. Akli Adjaoute, who founded the firm. It isn’t known if Adjaoute will continue with MasterCard beyond the transition period after transaction close.
Brighterion’s predecessor company was originally located in Europe prior to its founding in the U.S. in 1999. The company had an initial investor, the Sturm Group. MasterCard later invested an undisclosed amount in Brighterion.
Card networks and issuers stay awake at night thinking about payment fraud and how to mitigate it. So it’s no surprise that Mastercard is bulking up on fraud detection solutions, whether it’s behavioral biometrics from NuData or machine learning from Brighterion. Beyond the security applications, these technologies will also be increasingly valuable as analytical tools to predict customer shopping behavior and expand their purchase volume—another benefit for Mastercard.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group
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