Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 5/5 debate potential 1/5

Ulrich: Mastercard scores real-time transaction fraud in milliseconds using GenAI

Greg Ulrich · How AI is Powering Payments, with Greg Ulrich of Mastercard · Feb 5, 2025 · at 8:32

Greg Ulrich, Chief AI and Data Officer at Mastercard, details how Mastercard incorporates generative AI and vector databases into real-time transaction scoring.

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“The product we have is called Decision Intelligence, and that's where in the milliseconds we have between when a transaction passes through our network from when you tap to buy something in a store, it passes through MasterCard to go to the issuer. We're providing a score on that based on how likely that is a good or bad transaction. We use Gen AI, recurring neural networks and other technologies to effectively add features to that. By understanding not just your transaction history, but the overall ecosystem of merchant behaviors and create basically a merchant vector database in there to help understand whether or not this is likely to be a good or bad transaction, even if you've never shopped at that merchant before, because we can see like behaviors from other consumers.”

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