Elavon serves over 1.3 million customers in five countries, and is a leading provider for airlines.

Elavon, a global payments provider and subsidiary of U.S. Bank (NYSE: USB), will work with Brighterion, Mastercard’s (NYSE: MA) AI company, to minimize fraud. Though EMV chip technology has helped to reduce frauds on cards, digital fraud is on the rise. One reason is the massive growth in e-commerce transactions.

Digital payments have surged during the COVID-19 crisis. Fraudsters are said to be eyeing a once-in-a-generation opportunity in digital fraud. (Mastercard)

Brighterion

Founded in 2000, Brighterion is an AI specialist that provides advanced solutions for payments, financial institutions and healthcare. Mastercard acquired the company in 2017. Currently, Brighterion serves 74 of the 100 largest US banks, and processes over 100 million transactions annually.

Its solutions stop payment and acquirer fraud, reduce credit risk and delinquency, and fight financial crime.

“You want to be able to manage credit for the lifecycle of the user,” said Sudhir Jha, a Mastercard senior vice president and head of Brighterion to PYMNTS.com at Mastercard’s Virtual Cyber & Risk Summit. “You want to then be able to predict if there’s a delinquency that needs to be managed. And then once you identify [a delinquency], you want to have a way to do collections that can basically be catered toward that particular user in different ways to provide incentives to recover funds.”

Brighterion also provides fraud scores to Mastercard for every transaction occurring its network, and for AI-based authentication. The latter is a useful filter that enables MasterCard to “decline transactions that need to be declined, but also to approve more transactions and provide a much better experience for users.”

Mastercard’s AI Express is an artificial intelligence consulting service aimed at businesses with little experience in AI but looking to implement machine learning quickly.

AI Express builds a customized AI solution in just 6 to 8 weeks and prepares a customer for its successful deployment.

Elavon

At Elavon, Brighterion will help to mitigate risk and maintain the integrity of its global payment systems through the identification of transaction anomalies.

Elavon provides payment services to the airlines, hospitality, healthcare, retail, and public sector/educational sectors. It serves 1.3 million customers by providing payment processing solutions in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

The two companies will work with merchants on three continents to incorporate fraud monitoring into their systems.

“The increasing sophistication of fraudsters demands smarter, more nimble and innovative fraud tools that allow us to stay one step ahead,” said Tim Miller, senior vice president, global credit and risk, Elavon. “We look forward to bringing the strength and flexibility of Brighterion’s AI platform to our fight against fraud.”

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