Baba Nadimpalli, who had also been the CEO of the defunct company, was indicted Tuesday (Sept. 24) by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on charges of securities and wire fraud. He has also been charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“Startup founders cannot fake it until they make it by falsifying revenue metrics shared with investors,” Monique C. Winkler, director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office, said in a news release.

“While the SEC will continue to aggressively pursue private company executives who use falsehoods to raise money from investors, we also urge those who invest in private companies to remain vigilant.”

According to the indictment, Skael raised more than $40 million between 2020 and 2022 across three funding rounds, with Nadimpalli making false claims about the company’s revenues.

Prosecutors also allege that Nadimpalli falsely suggested to investors that his firm’s customers included a number of well-known companies, and that the CEO forged bank statements to show nonexistent payments from customers.

“Nadimpalli also allegedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of SKAEL’s money on his own personal expenses, including payments on his house and car,” the SEC said.

The commission also noted that the CEO claimed Skael “had millions of dollars in annually recurring revenue, which was more than 10 times the true amount.”

Nadimpalli, a resident of Australia, could not immediately be reached for comment by PYMNTS.

Skael, which was in business from 2016 to 2022, helped clients automate repetitive tasks. And no matter the truth behind the company’s operations, businesses are increasingly turning to technologies to ease the burden of manual work and fragmented workflows.

Among these technologies is robotic process automation (RPA), which is helping modernize AP and AR departments, enable more efficient operations, and better cash flow management help companies survive in a competitive market.

“For many SMBs, the challenge in AP/AR lies in dealing with the volume and variety of documents, many of which are still paper-based or siloed across disparate systems,” PYMNTS wrote recently, pointing to research showing that 75% of companies still use paper checks.

“RPA offers a way to automate data entry, verification, and processing, thus reducing the manual labor and potential for human error associated with these tasks.”

The post SEC Charges Skael Founder With Inflating Automation Startup’s Revenue appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Hone Capital launched with the help of a Chinese private equity group in 2015. Now, investigators are looking into whether the firm passed trade secrets to the Chinese government, the Financial Times (FT) reported Wednesday (Sept. 25).

Sources told the FT that the investigation is looking into whether Hone accessed information about the technology, finances or clients of startups on behalf of its owner or Beijing.

Those sources said there are concerns that some of Hone’s portfolio companies are contracted to deliver services to the American government, and that some of Hone’s funds may have come from the Chinese government.

Hone, the American arm of China’s CSC Group, has invested in startups such as the payments company Stripe. However, sources told the FT that Hone had no access to sensitive information from many of the startups in its portfolio, Stripe included.

The company’s lawyers provided this statement to the FT:

“Allegations that CSC Group, its chairman, or any of its affiliates, including Hone Capital, have misappropriated trade secrets are completely baseless and grounded in nothing but insinuation and speculation fuelled by anti-Chinese sentiment and self-serving allegations from former executives who are actively in litigation with CSC Group over, among other things, their own self-dealing.”

“The FBI has no comment,” the bureau’s press office told PYMNTS. “In keeping with Justice Department policy, the FBI neither confirms nor denies conducting specific investigations.”

The news comes during a year that has seen many tech firms tighten security measures over concerns about Chinese espionage, with companies such as Google conducting tighter employee screenings.

And June brought reports that OpenAI was taking steps to restrict China’s access to artificial intelligence (AI) software.

That came months after Congress passed legislation that would ban TikTok unless its China-based owner ByteDance divests itself of the popular social media platform within a year.

“Congress is not acting to punish ByteDance, TikTok, or any other individual company,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in remarks on the Senate floor before voting on the bill. “Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage, surveillance, maligned operations, harming vulnerable Americans, our servicemen and women, and our U.S. government personnel.”

For its part, China has banned iPhone use by government employees and workers at state-owned companies, and ordered Apple to remove WhatsApp, Threads, Telegram and Signal from its App Store in China, citing national security concerns.

The post FBI Reportedly Investigating Hone Capital’s Connections to China appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The bank said the regulations expected to go into effect next month will not prevent fraud, The Guardian reported Sunday (Sept. 22).

David Callington, the head of fraud at HSBC UK, said while the new rules will lead banks and payment firms to upgrade their fraud detection systems, they won’t be enough to stem the tide of authorized push payment (APP) fraud cases in the United Kingdom, per the report.

Those fraud incidents — in which people are tricked into sending money to accounts held by scammers — cost consumers hundreds of millions of pounds last year, the report said. Beginning next week, banks and payment companies must reimburse scam victims up to 85,000 pounds (about $114,000).

British regulators put the rules in place following a wave of APP fraud cases. Figures from the U.K.’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) showed that APP fraud reached nearly 341 million pounds last year, a 12% decline since 2022. However, the volume of fraud cases climbed by 12% to 252,636, up from 224,603 the previous year.

“We can see some positive changes with more victims being reimbursed than in 2022,” David Geale, the PSR’s managing director, said in August. “But there is still more to do — particularly for some smaller firms which have much higher rates of receiving fraud than larger firms.”

Meanwhile, financial industry lobbying groups argue that most APP fraud cases originate on online platforms and social media sites such as TikTok or Facebook, The Guardian report said.

“The wider ecosystem, and key players in that ecosystem, have to be held to account,” Callington said, per the report. While banks need to be vigilant, the financial obligations need to “sit with those other sectors as well. They need the financial incentive.”

So far, the British government has asked tech and social media companies to take a voluntary pledge to prevent fraud, the report said. However, Callington said fraud would continue until Big Tech is forced to reimburse scam victims in cases where their fraud prevention efforts were insufficient.

“[R]egulators will only step in when they see that actually there’s not enough traction [on preventing fraud], and we’re not generating the outcomes that we want … from the voluntary aspects that have been put in place,” Callington said, per the report.

The post HSBC: Tech Sector Should Help Refund APP Fraud Victims appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

As security threats evolve, a PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Progress and Protection: Balancing Convenience and Security in Digital Banking,” in collaboration with NCR Voyix, illustrates how banks must find a way to outsmart fraudsters while meeting consumer demands for both innovative services and enhanced security.

Redirecting Resources

As the financial landscape undergoes digital transformation, the financial sector faces challenges — not least among them the rising costs of fraud. In a cycle that jeopardizes innovation, banks and financial institutions are often forced to divert resources from long-term strategic goals to immediate threat mitigation. This shift has implications for the industry, slowing progress in the very innovations that could enhance security and improve customer experience.

Fraud is evolving, putting banks on high alert. In 2023, the average fraud-related costs for FIs with assets exceeding $5 billion surged to $3.8 million, a massive 65% increase from the previous year. This rise is attributed to more sophisticated fraud tactics, with purchase return authorization fraud averaging $115,000 per incident. Notably, 47% of FIs reported dealing with account takeover fraud (ATO) in the past year, while phishing attacks continue to target 73% of banking customers, leading to further security breaches. As a result, 43% of FIs noted an uptick in fraud incidents, and most of these attempts stem from systemic deficiencies within their existing fraud technology stacks.

Innovation vs Security

Striking a balance between innovation and security is crucial for banks and FIs. Consumer expectations are shifting, with 69% prioritizing fraud protection when selecting a financial institution. Furthermore, 32% consider this the most critical factor in their decision-making as the increasing demand for streamlined onboarding processes complicates the situation.

In fact, 24% of potential new account holders may be deterred if security measures are perceived as too cumbersome.

As digital banking becomes mainstream, so do security concerns. While 76% of consumers demand real-time service access, nearly half express skepticism regarding the security of artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced banking technologies.

Ninety-one percent of consumers emphasize the importance of safeguarding their personal information, indicating that trust is as essential as technological innovation in retaining customers. Consequently, banks must navigate this complex landscape, balancing security needs with consumer expectations for seamless digital experiences.

Can Banks Keep Up?

To combat security threats, banks and FIs must adopt proactive strategies, particularly as open banking presents new fraud risks. Consider 46% of institutions believe these risks outweigh the benefits, especially among those already grappling with high fraud levels. In response, many are leveraging advanced technologies like AI and machine learning to enhance security, with 79% of institutions using cloud solutions confident in offering secure real-time payments.

Additionally, 47% of consumers now use biometric authentication, and 60% believe it improves online security. To build resilience, banks should implement adaptive security measures, such as multifactor and biometric authentication, and prepare for future threats with post-quantum cryptography.

Collaborating with FinTechs can also spark innovation and agility, helping institutions meet the demands of a digital-first consumer base. As fraud tactics evolve, prioritizing security within digital strategies will be crucial for building trust and competitiveness in the market.

The post 69% of Consumers Prioritize Fraud Protection When Picking a Bank appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Chief financial officer Hugh Johnston announced the change this week, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (Sept. 19), citing an internal memo reviewed by the news outlet. That memo said many teams at the entertainment behemoth had begun switching over to “streamlined enterprise-wide collaboration tools.”

“Where we have opportunities to leverage more integrated tools and platforms we should,” the memo said.

The move comes after a hacker stole a terabyte worth of data — including 44 million messages and more than 18,800 spreadsheets and at least 13,000 PDFs — and leaked it online.

This included financial and strategy information, the WSJ said, along with personally identifiable information for employees and customers.

PYMNTS has contacted Disney and Slack-owner Salesforce for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

As covered here in July, the material was published by an anonymous hacking group known as “Nullbulge,” which has used Trojan horse tactics to distribute malicious software, hiding it in free add-ons for games and AI image generation software.

The hack comes in the midst of what PYMNTS has called “the year of the cyberattack,” following damaging attacks on several high-profile companies and organizations.

In the past year, 82% of eCommerce merchants suffered cyber or data breaches, with 47% saying the breaches resulted in both lost revenue and lost customers, according to “Fraud Management in Online Transactions,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Nuvei report.

As PYMNTS wrote soon after the Disney breach was reported, this sort of incident underlines the need for fault tolerance. The stakes are high, that report added, noting that breaches can cost companies millions, harm reputations and weaken customer trust. To reduce these risks, the emphasis must pivot from a purely preventive approach to a strategy that balances prevention with robust response and recovery.

“The barrier for entry has never been lower for threat actors,” Sunil Mallik, chief information security officer at Discover® Global Network, told PYMNTS in a recent interview, adding that the cost of computing power has decreased drastically over the past decade, making it easier for criminals to get access powerful tools and carry out sophisticated attacks.

“It’s a combination of defenses at the human layer, controls at the network layer, application layer and business process layer,” Mallik added. “This is complemented by continuous monitoring of the external threat environment.”

The post Report: Disney Cuts Ties With Slack After Data Heist appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

But that’s not great news for the business landscape, particularly as critical infrastructure providers are increasingly targeted by bad actors.

And with the news Tuesday (Sept. 17) that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a $13 million settlement with AT&T to resolve an Enforcement Bureau investigation, reducing the attack surface and entry points that hackers seek to exploit is top of mind for service providers and businesses. That investigation focused on the company’s supply chain integrity and whether it failed to protect the information of AT&T customers in connection with a data breach of a vendor’s cloud environment.

While traditionally, businesses have focused on internal cybersecurity measures, today’s interconnected digital ecosystem demands a more holistic approach.

With third-party vendors, cloud-based services and intricate supply chains playing key roles in day-to-day operations, the attack surface has expanded, giving threat actors more entry points to exploit. As these breaches have shown, protecting data is no longer just a matter of internal IT security; it requires a broad, collective effort among businesses, service providers and the vendors they rely on.

“Today’s announcement should send a strong message that the Enforcement Bureau will not hesitate to take action against service providers that choose to put their customers’ data in the cloud, share that data with their vendors, and then fail to be responsible custodians of that data,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal, who also serves as Chair of the FCC’s Privacy and Data Protection Task Force, said in a statement.

Underscoring the broader impact these data breaches can have, news also broke Tuesday that cybercriminals are brute-forcing passwords for highly privileged accounts on an accounting software provider widely used in the construction industry.

The report found active and ongoing corporate network breaches through these attacks at plumbing, HVAC, concrete and other sub-industry companies.

Read more: Aligning Payments and Data Operations With Compliance and Cyber Risks

Growing Threat of Cyberattacks: A Wake-Up Call for Businesses

In the wake of high-profile data breaches, including AT&T and other major companies, cybersecurity has become a central concern for organizations of all sizes, serving as a stark reminder that no company, no matter its size or resources, is immune to cyber threats.

These breaches have not only exposed millions of personal data records but also revealed vulnerabilities in the systems used by businesses and their service providers. As cyberattacks grow in frequency and sophistication, the responsibility to reduce the attack surface — the totality of vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit — is increasingly falling on businesses and their service providers.

The breaches have also proven to be costly. Outside of AT&T’s $13 million FCC settlement, news broke Sunday (Sept. 15) that 23andMe will pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit tied to a data breach that exposed the private information of almost 7 million customers.

For service providers, the obligation to secure their infrastructure and reduce attack surfaces is particularly urgent. As key facilitators of business operations, service providers often handle sensitive customer data, making them prime targets for cybercriminals. Moreover, their clients depend on the integrity of their systems to maintain secure operations. If service providers fail to prevent data breaches, the ripple effects extend beyond their own operations to impact countless businesses and consumers downstream.

See also: Guarding the Gate: Cyberattacks Won’t Stop, but Their Fallout Can Be Prevented

Collaboration Across the Digital Supply Chain 

In the current digital era, the battle against cyber threats is constant, and the attack surface will continue to evolve as businesses and service providers adopt new technologies. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of potential entry points for cybercriminals will grow exponentially. This means that the task of reducing the attack surface will only become more challenging over time.

As the AT&T vendor breach and construction industry’s woes have demonstrated, cybersecurity can no longer be confined to the walls of a single organization. The interconnected nature of modern business means that one company’s vulnerabilities can easily become another’s liabilities. As a result, service providers and businesses must work together to secure the entire supply chain.

The growing complexity of service providers’ infrastructures — ranging from legacy systems that are difficult to patch to expansive cloud services that open up new vulnerabilities — creates multiple layers of potential entry points for cybercriminals.

Reducing this attack surface involves not only securing internal systems but also ensuring that third-party vendors and partners adhere to stringent security protocols. Service providers must move from reactive cybersecurity measures to proactive, risk-based approaches that anticipate and mitigate potential threats before they can be exploited.

The post Reducing the Attack Surface: How Data Breaches Imperil Corporate Networks appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

But fraudsters have taken notice, capitalizing on the fact that the invoice, whether it’s digital or paper, represents one of a company’s most attractive attack surfaces.

Against this backdrop, invoice fraud is a rapidly growing threat, with cybercriminals and internal fraudsters increasingly finding ways to manipulate the payment process for illicit gain.

Invoice and vendor fraud can take many forms, from fake invoices sent by external cybercriminals to fraudulent activities carried out by employees with access to internal systems.

And as the contemporary threat landscape digitizes, with businesses becoming more reliant on digital transactions, the risk continues to rise, especially for companies with outdated systems or weak internal controls.

Cybercriminals have become adept at exploiting weaknesses in digital payment systems. Invoice fraud often starts with a phishing attack or a compromised email account. In these cases, attackers will intercept or spoof communications between businesses, posing as a legitimate vendor or supplier. They then send altered invoices or payment instructions, redirecting funds to fraudulent accounts.

For many B2B companies, these vulnerabilities have become a significant source of financial and operational risk.

Read more: Why Business Email Compromise Scams Target Valuable B2B Relationships

Outdated Systems and Weak Internal Controls: A Recipe for Disaster

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Automating Accounts Payable for Cost Savings” found that 34% of businesses process more than 5,000 invoices per month. At the same time, separate PYMNTS Intelligence in the report “Getting Paid: Digital Payments for Improving Cash Flow and Customer Experience” found that 75% of companies still use paper checks.

Those two statistics underscore a growing gap in the payments industry: the disconnect between accounts payable (AP) workflows and payments, which can leave businesses vulnerable to inefficiencies and fraud.

That’s because manual and paper-based processes expose companies to risks such as invoice duplication, payment fraud and vendor impersonation. Paper-based systems also make it difficult to implement stringent security controls, while fragmented tech stacks may not offer effective safeguards.

Fraudsters “will call your back-office staff who are not trained in payments fraud prevention and try to communicate false information over the phone. And these staffers, they are great, smart, hardworking people, but they do not have the tools and that is why the fraudsters are attacking them,” Ernest Rolfson, founder and CEO of Finexio, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in July.

“Fraud is the biggest and most important thing we hear from customers today in B2B payments … They want more automation, as much as possible, and they want no fraud,” Rolfson added.

Read also: Unlocking the 3 Biggest Benefits of Automating Accounts Payable

Strategies for Prevention and Risk Mitigation

Data shows the average enterprise receives half of its invoices on paper, with nearly four in 10 (38%) of payments being made manually. Against this backdrop, over a third of firms (36%) cite automating their AP function as a key priority.

Companies that rely on manual processes and systems that are prone to human error and offer limited visibility into transactions can find that they’ve inadvertently made it easier for both external and internal fraudsters to exploit them.

“The inflexibility of traditional systems and platforms have prevented lots of companies from moving forward and keeping up,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Operating Officer Illya Shell told PYMNTS.

Many businesses, especially small- to medium-sized businesses, also operate with limited financial oversight, allowing fraudulent invoices to slip through the cracks.

But advances in digital payments technology, including automated invoicing and payment platforms with built-in fraud detection capabilities, can help reduce the risk of human error and flag suspicious transactions in real time. These systems offer greater visibility into the payment process and can quickly identify anomalies, such as changes to bank account details or unusual payment requests.

Ultimately, the human layer of defense, as emphasized by many of the risk management leaders PYMNTS has spoken to, is increasingly critical in shrinking enterprise attack surfaces — making individual education around best practices crucial for a company’s own employees.

Developing strong relationships with trusted vendors and suppliers can also help reduce the risk of fraudulent invoices. Businesses should verify vendor details before making payments and regularly review supplier contracts to ensure that services are being rendered as agreed.

Looking ahead, as businesses invest in advanced technologies, strengthen internal policies and educate their employees on fraud risks, the future intersection of both payments automation and fraud prevention looks bright.

“There are a lot of changes happening across a lot of outdated or antiquated industries. We’re in a good space right now to see a lot of change,” Priority Head of Commercial Court Toomey told PYMNTS. “It’s ironic that one of the areas for most companies that is the most outdated are their financial tools, when just a small investment from that same team can go a long way in improving efficiency and also cost savings.”

The post Invoice Invasion: Defending the Finance Department From Hidden Fraud Risks appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The new Financial Crime and Compliance Management (FCCM) Monitor Cloud Service gives these organizations a holistic, centralized view of their FCCM efforts and provides granular reporting capabilities to help them demonstrate these efforts to regulators and other stakeholders, the company said in a Tuesday (Sept. 17) press release.

“Oracle Financial Crime and Compliance Management Monitor Cloud Service helps banks understand financial crime risk within their business so they can manage and report that risk more effectively,” Jason Somrak, chief of product, financial crime and compliance at Oracle Financial Services, said in the release. “With the solution, they will be able to surface critical information and access deeper insights with much more granularity and preciseness.”

The FCCM Monitor Cloud Service provides chief anti-money laundering (AML) officers and their teams with a business analytics reporting system featuring a dashboard approach designed to meet their needs and access to key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, according to the release.

The service offers interactive visualizations designed to convey information in the most compelling way for each audience; drill-down capabilities that provide more detailed data and deeper insights; data filters that enable focus on specific time periods, categories or other criteria; and report customization to meet specific requirements, per the release.

“It is critical for banks, FinTechs and other financial services companies to continue to improve their FCCM capabilities amidst ever-increasing sophistication in financial crime tactics, ongoing regulatory scrutiny and the rise in the overall volume of transactional data in digital banking,” the release said.

Sixty-two percent of all financial institutions said they experienced an increase in financial crime in 2022, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and Featurespace collaboration, “The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.”

The report also found that 66% of AML executives said complex regulatory requirements are a challenge, 58% said the sophistication of fraud schemes is a challenge in combating fraud, and 95% highly prioritize innovation in anti-fraud and anti-crime solutions.

The post Oracle Launches Financial Crime and Compliance Management Service appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Consumers who are eligible for a payment will receive an email between now and Friday (Sept. 20), the FTC plans to send PayPal payments on Sept. 23, and recipients should redeem their PayPal payment within 30 days, the FTC said in a Monday (Sept. 16) press release.

The FTC uses a variety of payment methods to send refunded money to consumers, according to a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on its website. Consumers can visit an FTC web page to see whether the refund program in which they are involved is sending checks, debit cards, Zelle payments or PayPal payments, according to the FAQ page.

In the case of FloatMe, the refunds follow an action taken by the FTC in January, in which the regulator alleged that FloatMe promised quick and free cash advances to consumers who joined it service but then failed to deliver the promised advance amounts, charged fees to get the cash quickly, made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and discriminated against those who received public assistant, according to the release.

The FTC’s complaint also alleged that FloatMe made “baseless” claims that an algorithm or other automated system would increase the cash advance limits offered to consumers, per the release.

FloatMe did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The FTC plans to send more than $2.6 million in refunds to 449,344 consumers who were FloatMe members and paid for instant cash advances, according to the release.

When announcing the charges and the terms of a settlement order, Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a Jan. 24 press release: “FloatMe lured consumers in with false promises of free money advances, and then used dark patterns to make it difficult for consumers to cancel.”

“The FTC will continue to hold companies accountable for unfair, deceptive and discriminatory credit practices, whether they call their products loans, advances, income-share agreements or something else,” Levine said.

FTC lawsuits resulted in over $324 million in refunds to consumers in 2023.

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At a high level, Recorded Future analyzes a broad set of data sources to provide visibility into potential threats to help customers take action to prevent risks and create models that anticipate new attacks. The company boasts a roster of 1,900 clients internationally across 75 countries, including 45 governments, and counts more than half of the Fortune 500 companies as clients.

“No one wakes up in the morning and says: ‘Today, I’m going to use my payment card,’” Johan Gerber, executive vice president of security solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS after the announcement. “If you think about our hyperconnected and interdependent digital world … almost every day that goes by sees the expansion of the digital footprint. You wake up and you get a coffee, maybe you fill up your car — or you read something online, and your payment is integrated into the digital experience.”

That expansion has given rise to a continuum of activities that create commerce ecosystems, tied to ubiquitous mobile devices where payments are in the background. That means the fraud and attack vectors are also expanding. Fraudsters are swarming everything from account openings to how and when consumers use apps, and where their credentials are stored.

Along the way, Gerber said, the lines between cybercrime and fraud are collapsing, as stolen credentials are harvested when a website is breached. The stolen credentials are used for scams and social engineering, and card and other types of fraud are rampant.

According to Gerber, the key to safeguarding trust in the future of the rapidly expanding digital environment lies in thinking about security and real-time visibility into the digital economy well beyond the payment itself.

Gerber said one of the attractions of the acquisition is the insight into consumer behaviors and potential threats that Recorded Future will bring.

“By the time you get to the payment, you’re almost at the last part of that digital interaction you’re having as a consumer,” Gerber said. “So for us to go beyond the payment really means in this specific instance, how do we look broadly across the entire digital interaction rather than specifically the payment. Now, if you think about the services that Mastercard offers today, we often talk about things that we do before the transaction, like account opening, biometrics authentication and so forth.”

“We will continue to operate as the same company, but now with a new owner and an even greater capacity to scale,” said Recorded Future CEO Christopher Ahlberg in a blog post. “As an independent subsidiary of Mastercard, we will leverage advanced AI tools and techniques to deliver threat intelligence on a global scale, empowering our analysts and clients to better protect their organizations.”

The payments network has made billions of dollars worth of acquisitions through the years.

Within the security solutions segment of Mastercard, key focal points center on examining and protecting digital identities, protecting transactions and using insights from 143 billion annual payments to fashion real-time intelligence that can be used by merchants and FIs to anticipate new threats.

By way of example, the firm acquired Ekarta in 2021 to score transactions for the likelihood of fraud through robust identity verification. All told, Mastercard has invested more than $7 billion over the past five years in its efforts to protect the digital economy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key ingredient here, and Gerber detailed to PYMNTS that the company has been a pioneer in harnessing generative AI to extract trends from huge swaths of data to create “identity graphs” that provide immediate value to any merchant or FI that wants to understand more about the individuals that’s interacting with them in the digital realm.

The use of other “intelligence graphs” connects the dots across data points to turn threat-related data into actionable insights.

“We already see a tremendous number of attacks and different attack vectors that we can combine with what Recorded Future sees, which means the inputs can help Mastercard clients, including governments, insurance companies, manufacturers” and critical infrastructure providers, Gerber said.

The new acquisition, he said, will complement and strengthen Mastercard’s efforts to combat card-related fraud, scams and account-to-account fraud across the globe.

“This is a real investment in safeguarding trust,” he told PYMNTS, “so that consumers can go about their business with ease … the digital ecosystem just continues to grow, and so this will be a very important part of the defenses that we have in place to secure the future.”

The post Mastercard Enhances Real-Time Threat Visibility With Recorded Future Purchase appeared first on PYMNTS.com.