What AI builders can learn from fraud models that run in 300 milliseconds

Fraud protection is a race against scale. For instance, Mastercard’s network processes roughly 160 billion transactions a year, and experiences surges of 70,000 transactions a second during peak periods (like the December holiday rush). Finding the fraudulent purchases among those — without chasing false alarms — is an incredible task, which is why fraudsters have been able to game the system. But now, sophisticated AI models can probe down to individual transactions, pinpointing the ones that seem suspicious — in milliseconds’ time. This is the heart of Mastercard’s flagship fraud platform, Decision Intelligence Pro (DI Pro). “DI Pro is specifically looking at each transaction and the risk associated with it,” Johan Gerber, Mastercard’s EVP of security solutions, said in a recent VB Beyon