• Finalist in the Software category and an honorable mention in the AI & Data category as part of the 2021 World-Changing Ideas Awards
• Feedzai Fairband was recently recognized as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year” by Fintech Breakthrough Awards and as “RegTech of the Year” in the 2021 Asia FinTech Awards
• Feedzai recently announced a $200 million Series D investment round valuing the company well above $1 billion

San Mateo, California – May 4th, 2021 – Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, today announced that Feedzai Fairband – the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework – has been selected as a finalist in the Software category and received an honorable mention in the AI & Data category as part of the 2021 World-Changing Ideas Awards by Fast Company.

Feedzai Fairband addresses a high social impact issue — the discrimination that people face when trying to access to financial services across the world. The technology allows financial institutions to select the machine learning models that perform well for both risk management and fairness, greatly reducing bias in the process. This powerful combination allows companies to protect customers from financial crime, while at the same time keep them safe from bias that could prevent them from opening a bank account or getting a loan due to their ethnicity, gender, location, or other personal information.

“Being part of the selected group of companies that have been recognized by their contributions to make the world a better place fills us with pride,” said Pedro Bizarro, Chief Science Officer at Feedzai. “AI is not enough anymore. Every initiative that leverages this powerful technology needs to implement Responsible AI principles, such as fairness and transparency, and we’re very proud to be the front runners in this space.” 

Feedzai Fairband is a patent-pending AutoML algorithm that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models with zero additional model training cost while increasing model fairness by 93 percent on average. With this new technology, Feedzai allows financial institutions across the world to make better and fairer decisions under the premise that protecting consumers from financial crime can and should be done in a Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical (FATE) way. Feedzai has its own FATE-dedicated research group which focuses on several Responsible AI initiatives such as model explainability, bias auditing, algorithmic fairness, and more.

“There is no question our society and planet are facing deeply troubling times. So, it’s important to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, impact, design, scalability, and passion to solve these problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have discovered some of the most groundbreaking projects that have launched since the start of 2020.”

The 5th annual awards honor the products, concepts, companies, policies, and designs that are pursuing innovation for the good of society and the planet. The projects are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving health and climate crises, social injustice, or economic inequality.

This award is Feedzai Fairband’s third industry honor since the framework was launched less than two months ago. Feedzai Fairband was also recognized as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year” by Fintech Breakthrough Awards in March and more recently as “RegTech of the Year” in the 2021 Asia FinTech Awards.

Visit Feedzai’s blog to learn more about Responsible AI.

About Feedzai:
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, protecting people and payments with a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime. Feedzai is trusted by leading financial institutions to manage critical risk and compliance processes, safeguarding trillions of dollars of transactions while improving the customer experience and protecting the privacy of everyday users. For more information, visit feedzai.com.

Media Contacts:
Feedzai [email protected]

Series D financing values Feedzai well above $1 billion
Capital to be used to further strengthen company’s market-leading position

San Mateo, California & Lisbon, Portugal – March 24th, 2021 – Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, today announced a $200 million Series D investment round led by leading global investment firm KKR, with participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures. The new investment will be used to accelerate the company’s global expansion, further develop its product offerings, and boost its partner strategy to strengthen its position as one of the most comprehensive financial crime prevention and risk management solutions in the market.

Feedzai’s platform is used by the world’s leading financial institutions, payment providers, and merchants to manage the risk of financial crime while enabling an optimized experience for end-users. The core of Feedzai’s offering is its artificial intelligence and machine learning platform, which processes customer and third-party data to identify, assess, and accelerate the remediation of potential threats.

The net result of this approach is significantly higher rates of financial crime detection with lower rates of false positives in contrast to legacy, often rules-based approaches, and meaningful cost savings for customers through fewer charge-backs, more efficient triage of alerts, and avoidance of regulatory fines. In addition, Feedzai’s technology allows a more seamless, real-time experience for consumers. Feedzai’s core offering originally focused on identifying transaction fraud, but in recent years has leveraged the underlying technology to expand into adjacencies such as anti-money laundering and account opening – making Feedzai one of the most comprehensive cloud-based financial crime prevention platforms in the market.

The investment comes as demand for Feedzai’s technology is accelerating alongside the rapid shift to digital banking and commerce, which has led to a significant increase in consumers becoming victims of financial crime. In the last quarter of 2020 alone, consumers faced a 650% increase in account takeover scams, a 600% in impersonation scams, and a 250% increase in online banking fraud attacks compared to the first quarter in the same year, according to Feedzai’s data.

Today, Feedzai monitors companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries, with products protecting half of the U.K.’s and Canada’s populations, as well as four of the five largest banks in North America. Many of the world’s largest financial institutions, such as Citibank, Fiserv, and Santander, as well as the world’s most innovative Fintechs such as SoFi and Mox by Standard Chartered, already use Feedzai’s AI-powered risk management solutions. Every time someone opens a bank account, transfers money, or makes a payment with their mobile device, they are experiencing transparency, convenience, and protection in 3 milliseconds or less – all made possible by Feedzai’s AI platform.

“Feedzai’s technology is the cornerstone of today’s commerce as consumers across the globe expect fast, reliable, seamless, and, above all, secure banking and payment experiences. The world has faster digitization requirements, and financial institutions need reliable solutions that thrive in this new digital environment in days, not months,” said Nuno Sebastiao, CEO and Chairman of Feedzai. “We’re thrilled to be working with KKR to bring more innovation into this space and to keep protecting our customers from an ever-evolving financial crime landscape.”

“Feedzai offers a powerful solution to one of the biggest challenges we are facing today: financial crime in the digital age. Global commerce depends on future-proof technologies capable of dealing with a rapidly evolving threat landscape. At the same time, consumers rightfully demand a great customer experience, in addition to strong security layers when using banking or payments services,” said Stephen Shanley, Managing Director at KKR.

Spencer Chavez, Principal at KKR, continued, “We believe Feedzai’s platform uniquely meets these expectations and more, and we are looking forward to working with Nuno and the rest of the team to expand their offering even further.”

The investment follows the close of another exceptional financial year where Feedzai saw significant growth in all its geographic markets and customer verticals. In addition to its core offering, the company recently launched “Feedzai Solutions,” an initiative aimed at democratizing the fight against financial crime by allowing financial institutions of all sizes to benefit from the most advanced technology available today in an “out-of-the-box” format. The company has also expanded its Responsible AI framework, which was recently recognized as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year” by Fintech Breakthrough, to allow financial institutions to provide the best customer experience possible while ensuring that Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) become part of the decision-making process.

KKR will be making the investment through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund II, a fund dedicated to growth equity investment opportunities in the technology space.

About Feedzai
Feedzai is the market leader in fighting financial crime with today’s most advanced cloud-based risk management platform, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Feedzai has one mission: to make banking and commerce safe by combining fraud prevention and anti-money laundering under one platform to manage financial crime. Founded by data scientists and aerospace engineers, Feedzai is considered best in class by Aite and one of the most successful AI companies by Forbes. The world’s largest banks, processors, and retailers use Feedzai to safeguard trillions of dollars and manage risk while improving customer ex
perience.

About KKR
KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management and capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKR’s insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of The Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKR’s investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKR’s website at www.kkr.com and on Twitter @KKR_Co.

About Feedzai:
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, protecting people and payments with a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime. Feedzai is trusted by leading financial institutions to manage critical risk and compliance processes, safeguarding trillions of dollars of transactions while improving the customer experience and protecting the privacy of everyday users. For more information, visit feedzai.com.

Media Contacts:
Feedzai [email protected]

KKR Americas
Cara Major or Miles Radcliffe-Trenner
212-750-8300
[email protected]

Milltown Partners (for KKR EMEA)
Amir Mizroch
+972-50-9989-338
[email protected]

• New patent-pending AutoML algorithm that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models with zero additional model training cost while increasing model fairness by 93%
• Innovation recognized as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year” by Fintech Breakthrough Awards

San Mateo, California, and London, United Kingdom – March 17th, 2021 – Feedzai, the leading cloud-based financial risk management platform, has announced Feedzai Fairband, the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework. The new AutoML algorithm automatically discovers machine learning models with zero additional model training cost while increasing model fairness by up to 93%, on average. With this new technology, Feedzai allows financial institutions across the world to make better and fairer decisions.

Feedzai Research developed the new framework under the premise that protecting financial institutions from financial crime can and should be done in a fair, accountable, and transparent way and that AI should not harm consumers. Feedzai Fairband can be used with any fairness metrics, model metrics, and sensitive attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, location, and more. In addition, the technology works with any algorithm and model settings and has shown vast applicability besides risk and financial crime management.

“Feedzai Fairband is one of the biggest milestones in the financial services industry as it presents a low-cost, no-friction framework to address one the biggest problems of our era – AI bias,” says Dr. Pedro Bizarro, Chief Science Officer at Feedzai. “By creating the most advanced framework for AI fairness, Feedzai is allowing financial institutions to incorporate a critical piece of technology that addresses a problem under close public scrutiny with proven damaging effects across the globe. Building accurate and fairer models will be less challenging from now on.”

The problem
The world has witnessed widespread reports of AI bias in several sectors in critical areas of society, such as criminal justice, healthcare, or financial services. Real-world examples include racial and gender discrimination in several domains, including facial recognition, job-applicant screening tools, access to credit, or even medical diagnosis. The lack of regulation in AI Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) has created a worldwide problem that is expected to grow substantially over the next few years if industry leaders and governments don’t act quickly.

Particularly in the fintech industry, there’s a risk that AI systems deny access to financial services disproportionately across people from different groups, based on race, age, place of residence, profession, or employment status. Access to banking services is paramount today, especially during a pandemic in which there has been a rapid transition to digital payments.

Despite recent awareness, using fairness as an objective when developing AI is not standard practice yet. There’s a lack of practical fairness-enhancing methodologies and tools for practitioners, and developing less biased models faces three main challenges:

1. Practitioners are not sure how to measure fairness and assume that there is a costly trade-off (that much less biased models also have to be much less accurate);
2. Practitioners assume that decisions are out of their hand, frequently stating that “models are not biased, what is biased is the data”;
3. Practitioners assume that creating fairer models is complex in terms of model building activities and expensive in terms of time.

The Solution
Feedzai’s new patent-pending AutoML algorithm automatically discovers fairer machine learning models with zero additional model training cost, and near-zero sacrifice in terms of model accuracy while increasing model fairness by up to 93%, on average.

Feedzai Fairband can be used with any fairness metrics, model metrics, and sensitive attributes such as age, gender, ethnicity, location, and more. In addition, the technology works with any ML algorithm, model settings and can be seamlessly integrated into existing machine learning pipelines, allowing organizations to adapt pre-existing business operations to accommodate fairness with residual cost and without significant friction.

—

By not measuring and preventing bias, financial institutions will perpetuate AI behaviors that ultimately have a negative impact on how people use banking products and services. Adopting technology that deals with bias efficiently and flexibly helps mitigate these unwanted consequences while allowing customers to experience less discriminatory access to financial services, fostering their economic well-being and access to services in the digital age.

Fintech Breakthrough has recognized Feedzai Fairband as “Fraud Prevention Innovation of the Year”. James Johnson, Managing Director, FinTech Breakthrough, said, “Feedzai embodies the spirit of the FinTech Breakthrough Awards with an innovative solution addressing a critical issue. We are proud to extend our congratulations to Feedzai for winning such an important award in the 2021 FinTech Breakthrough Awards program.”

Feedzai Fairband will become available to Feedzai’s customers in Q2 2021. 

If you want to learn more about the problems financial institutions face, check out Feedzai’s blog post: Understanding AI Bias in Banking, and the research paper.

About Feedzai:
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, protecting people and payments with a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime. Feedzai is trusted by leading financial institutions to manage critical risk and compliance processes, safeguarding trillions of dollars of transactions while improving the customer experience and protecting the privacy of everyday users. For more information, visit feedzai.com.

Media Contacts:
Feedzai [email protected]

• 650% increase in Account Take Over scams from Q4 2020 as compared to Q1 2020 

• 250% increase in online banking fraud attacks

• 178% fraud rate increase for digital media

• 70% of all fraud is driven by card not present (CNP) transactions

• 48% drop in card present (CP) fraud attacks, though transaction volume only drops 20%

San Mateo, California – March 4th, 2021 – Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based risk management platform, has announced its Financial Crime Report Q1, 2021. Feedzai’s data from financial transactions across the world shows a stark difference in consumer behavior and financial crime in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region as compared to Europe (EU) and North America (NA). A clear image appears – a hyper-digital world where east and west are in different recovery stages, reflecting different regional financial crime trends.

Overall, 2020 allowed fraudsters to rejoice at the rapid shift to digital banking and commerce while consumers got swindled by purchase, impersonation, money mule schemes, and account takeover scams.

650% Increase in Account Takeover (ATO) Scams in Q
In an ATO attack, fraudsters obtain stolen credentials, account information, and passwords that belong to legitimate users. Once they access the account, they can transfer funds or buy goods with stolen credentials. Transfers occur when consumers move money from one account to another. The growing popularity of real-time payment functions, combined with the expansion of online banking, means that money moves quickly, and once it’s gone, it’s almost impossible to get back. 

Feedzai’s fraud experts noticed an uptick of stolen credentials for sale on the dark web in 2020. The proliferation of stolen credentials, along with the exponential rise in online transactions, provided ideal conditions for fraudsters to blend in with legitimate consumer traffic without being detected. 

250% Increase in Online Banking in Attempted Fraud on Online Banking
Online banking isn’t new, but it’s newly popular. There’s been a 200% increase in mobile banking, and fraudsters worked to blend in among them. Online banking experienced a 250% increase in attempted fraud. As expected, both telephone and branch fraud rates dropped to lower levels than they had been before the pandemic. 

178% Fraud Rate Increase for Digital Media
In Q2 2020, during the height of global lockdowns, demand for books and streaming services such as music and movies increased. Demand remained strong in the APAC region, but NA and EU eventually returned to pre-pandemic baseline levels. The story around fraud is quite different, at least for NA and EU. In these regions, attempted fraud attacks increased a whopping 178% since January 2020.   

48% Drop in Card Present Fraud Attacks; Volume Only Drops 20%
Card present transactions dropped by about 20% at the start of the pandemic and have consistently remained around that level. However, fraud attacks tumbled by an incredible 48%. 

Card not present Transactions Drive 70% of Fraud Attacks
Fraudsters love CNP transactions, and without essential security measures such as machine learning, behavioral analytics, biometrics, and two-factor authentication (2FA), they likely will continue for some time to come.

Top 5 Transfer Fraud Schemes
Across the board, the pandemic was a boon for fraudsters and a burden for consumers. When it comes to transfers fraud, criminals were more drawn to the following five fraud schemes than to all others. 

• Impersonation Scams – 23%

• Purchase Scams – 22% 

• Account Takeover Scams – 22%

• Investment Scams – 6%

• Romance Scams – 3% 

Top 5 Anti Money Laundering Red Flags
AML alerts don’t necessarily mean a crime occurred. Financial Institutions (FIs) determine their risk thresholds and sets their alerts accordingly. However, several triggered AML alert types can indicate that money mules are funneling money obtained through illegal activities

• Rapid Movement of Funds

• Transactions in Same or Similar Amounts

• High-Risk Geography 

• Activity in Dormant Account

• Transactions in Round Amounts

10 Financial Crime Prevention Tips for Consumers
Fraudsters are eager to separate you from your money. Here are some tips to keep your finances secure.

1. Research retailers before you purchase and only shop on secure sites that use “https.”
2. Pay with your credit card, not a debit card, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all online transactions.
3. If a deal is too good to be true, it’s probably a scam. This is also true for jobs promising easy money for little or no effort.
4. Check for typos or unusual URLs in the sender’s email address, such as “[email protected].
5. Avoid links that ask you to click on them to provide protected personal information (PPI) such as social security or account numbers.
6. Do not answer calls from unfamiliar or unknown caller IDs.
7. If your credentials are stolen or compromised, change all of your passwords and never use the stolen password again. 
8. Make sure to choose complex, unique passwords for each account, and change your passwords every few months.
9. Do not provide PPI to anyone claiming to be a government official or from your bank; these entities will not call you and ask for this information.
10. Legitimate employers won’t ask employees to transfer money in and out of personal accounts. 

7 Ways FIs can Prevent and Detect Financial Crime
Banks have a role to play in keeping their customers safe from fraudsters and scammers. Here are a few steps banks can take to ensure their customers are well-protected.

1. Create detailed customer behavior profiles so that you can recognize and differentiate authentic customer behavior from criminal behavior.
2. Educate your customers in best practices for good digital hygiene.
3. Implement security measures (e.g., 2FA).
4. Combine inbound and outbound payments monitoring and include movement of payments between account rings.
5. Capitalize on existing relationships with e-crime providers, dark web experts, and internal and external cybersecurity professionals to uncover credential testing and check customer scam reporting.
6. Participate in consortium data at least twice a week.
7. Leverage rules, machine learning, and data analytics to detect and prevent fraud and financial crime. 

“2020 was a year of rapid growth in financial crime. Fraudsters tried to take advantage of the convergence between a fast-paced digital environment and a new wave of inexperienced consumers to perpetrate a multitude of attacks that created a significant uptick in fraud,” said Jaime Ferreira, Senior Director of Global Data Science at Feedzai. “Financial institutions need to further invest in technologies to protect their customers while developing educational approaches. Robust technology and informed consumers are a powerful combination when fighting financial crime.”

Access Feedzai’s Quarterly Financial Crime Report to learn more about the latest fraud and consumer trends.

About Feedzai:
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, protecting people and payments with a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime. Feedzai is trusted by leading financial institutions to manage critical risk and compliance processes, safeguarding trillions of dollars of transactions while improving the customer experience and protecting the privacy of everyday users. For more information, visit feedzai.com.

Media Contacts:
Feedzai [email protected]

San Mateo, California. March 2nd, 2021 — Feedzai, the world’s leading cloud-based risk management platform announced today that it has been recognized in Forrester’s NowTech: Enterprise Fraud Management, Q1 2021 report. The report provides an overview of 37 Enterprise Fraud Management (EFM) providers. 

The report is designed to help security and risk professionals understand the value they can expect from an EFM provider, while also providing guidance on selecting vendors based on their respective expertise. In addition, the report addresses critical elements in EFM solutions that reduce fraud, minimize customer friction, and provide explainable fraud models – an increasingly important element as Responsible AI discussions take place from a regulatory perspective.

“The days of closed risk scoring models for fraud management are over,” writes Andras Cser, Vice President, and Principal Analyst – Security and Risk Management at Forrester Research in the report: “EFM solutions have evolved and matured a great deal in the past two or three years, with considerable improvements to the model building and testing lifecycle, link analysis, and reporting.” 

• Detect and prevent fraud while minimizing customer friction in real-time
• How Feedzai helps
• Monitor customer and account activity across multiple channels (ATM, mobile banking, online banking, etc)
• Detect cross-channel attacks in real-time 
• Use a single Case Manager across all customer channels to investigate alerts and create cases
• Productized and proven machine learning models across verticals and geographies
• How Feedzai helps
• Geographic specific solutions scale with our clients as they grow their businesses across the globe
• Best-of-Breed algorithms (Random Forest, Deep Learning, OpenML), in addition to  a rules-based risk scoring engine, analyze large datasets in milliseconds, offering real-time decision-making capabilities
• Feedzai Solutions (native cloud, SaaS) offers ready-to-use, transparent models at a fraction of traditional deployment times
• Explainable and extendable models
• How Feedzai helps
• Feedzai Whitebox Explanations couples each event scored by the system with a list of human-readable explanations; Feedzai Bias Audit Reports help data scientists conduct regular AI audits for bias and fairness
• Genome, Feedzai’s visual link analysis tool, leverages omnidata ingestion to produce high-quality alerts, surfaces hidden fraud, and ensures the right investigator is focusing on the right reviews
• Feedzai’s OpenML Engine allows in-house teams to bring 3rd party models trained on Python, Java, H2O, etc to the Feedzai platform, leveraging its use-case specific features and rules to fight new and evolving financial crime

Forrester’s report recommends: “invite vendors that have productized and proven models in your vertical…offering pre-customized, transparent, ready-to-use, and low-code models for your specific vertical.” For Feedzai, this recommendation perfectly aligns with its new fully packaged Feedzai Solutions, which addresses the importance of selecting a partner that offers an agile, easy to deploy, and low resource solution for financial institutions that can assess risk in real-time. With the configuration of machine learning models and a comprehensive library of out-of-the-box scenarios, Feedzai’s new offering presents itself as a turnkey solution that better protects customers with quicker time-to-value. 

“Feedzai is uniquely positioned to provide a single risk management solution that addresses the biggest pain points in the financial services industry,” says Varun Kohli, CMO at Feedzai. “We believe Forrester’s NowTech: EFM report highlights fundamental elements already embedded in Feedzai’s products and we are excited to see that the market is heading in the right direction.”

Feedzai’s capabilities are proven across the largest banks, fintechs, e-commerce merchants, and payment processors in the world while providing the only single platform with omnichannel capabilities to manage financial risk.

Check out Forrester’s full report: feedzai.com/resource/forresters-enterprise-fraud-q1-2021/

About Feedzai:
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, protecting people and payments with a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime. Feedzai is trusted by leading financial institutions to manage critical risk and compliance processes, safeguarding trillions of dollars of transactions while improving the customer experience and protecting the privacy of everyday users. For more information, visit feedzai.com.

Media Contacts:
Feedzai [email protected]