The industry leader in payments, Mastercard, is now implementing generative AI approaches to strengthen the safeguards that keep customers and the payments network as a whole safe.

A real-time decisioning tool from Mastercard called Decision Intelligence (DI) already assists banks in approving 143 billion transactions annually in a secure manner. In order to determine if a transaction is likely to be authentic or not, new generative AI technology will scan an unprecedented one trillion data points. This will enhance Mastercard's current capacity to analyze account, purchase, merchant, and device information in real time.

In order to evaluate the risk of a transaction, "Decision Intelligence Pro," a next-generation system, evaluates the connections between several parties involved. This technique sharpens the data banks receive by improving the total DI score in less than 50 milliseconds.

According to Mastercard, preliminary modeling indicates that AI improvements increase fraud detection rates by 20 percent on average and up to 300 percent in some cases.

"Building trust in all of our interactions"

The president of Mastercard's cyber and intelligence division, Ajay Bhalla, made the following statement regarding the application of AI to combat fraud: "We are transforming the speed and accuracy of our anti-fraud solutions, deflecting the efforts of criminals, and protecting banks and their customers with generative AI." Increasing the power of our system will enable us to predict the next possible fraudulent incident, bringing confidence to every exchange.

"Our own analysis has shown that the precision of the solution—achieved by scanning potential points of sale in real-time—not only increases accuracy but also reduces the number of false positives by more than 85 percent."

By strengthening DI, banks hope to better safeguard customers against fraudulent transactions and reduce the number of false positives—regular transactions that are mistakenly reported as fraudulent.