PURCHASE, N.Y.—Mastercard is reporting it has built its own proprietary generative artificial intelligence model it said is designed to help its issuer financial institutions detect and root out fraudulent transactions.
The company told CNBC its new advanced AI model, Decision Intelligence Pro, will allow issuing institutions to better assess suspicious transactions on its network in real-time and determine whether they’re legitimate or not.
Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence business unit, told CNBC that the new AI solution is a proprietary recurrent neural network — a core part of generative AI — that was built from scratch by the company’s cybersecurity and anti-fraud teams.
‘Transformer Models’
“We are using the transformer models which basically help get the power of generative AI,” Bhalla told CNBC. “It’s all built in house we’ve got all kinds of data from the ecosystem. Because of the very nature of the business we are in, we see all the transaction data which comes to us from the ecosystem.”
In some cases, Mastercard is relying on open source “whenever needed,” but the “majority” of the technology is created in house, Bhalla added.
Mastercard said its proprietary algorithm is trained on data from the roughly 125-billion transactions that go through the company’s card network annually.
According to the company, the data helps the AI understand relationships between merchants — rather than words, as is the focus with large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini — and predict where fraudulent transactions are taking place.
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