Overview

pWorldpay is a payments processing company acquired by FIS Global in 2019. FIS is a world leader in technology and services that helps businesses and communities thrive by advancing commerce and the financial world. By connecting merchants, banks and capital markets, FIS and Worldpay apply scale, deep expertise and data-driven insights to solve for their clients’ future, and deliver experiences that are more simple, seamless and secure to advance the way the world pays, banks and invests. Headquartered in Jacksonville, FL, FIS employs more than 55,000 people across 50+ countries. The company offers more than 450 solutions and processes over $75b of transactions around the planet. FIS is a Fortune 500® company and is a member of Standard Poor’s 500 Index./p

Supernova Award Category

AI and Augmented Humanity

The Problem

pWith an international event on the horizon and a global customer base, Worldpay needed to upgrade its anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring to a much more robust solution. Worldpay leaders recognized that effective AML could be extremely difficult for their organization when taking into account its massive data volumes and scalability requirements. After being divested by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2010, Worldpay identified that its AML solution was inefficient and time consuming. Developed ad hoc by a number of departments and including a myriad of conflicting add-on features, the homegrown solution had over 2,000 rules. Making adjustments to the system was incredibly difficult and understanding the impact of changes being made was even more challenging. Additionally, Worldpay’s existing AML system could not monitor for credit risk and anticipate failures, a key capability for any payments processor. Worldpay knew Brighterion AI was the right solution when they learned they could manage their own models and AI. Worldpay recognized that in order to securely and successfully serve all its merchants at the then-upcoming 2012 London Olympics, it needed a new, highly dynamic and scalable AML solution that would allow them to make impactful changes on the fly. Building such a solution in-house wasn’t an option as Worldpay had neither the required technical skills, nor did it want to devote that much investment to building an AML system from the ground up./p

The Solution

pTo achieve proactive, dynamic and scalable AML, while ensuring compliance with UK government regulations, Worldpay worked with Brighterion to move beyond an existing rules-based system to implement highly adaptive, real-time, AI-based fraud prevention. Brighterion built the model using Worldpay’s historical data. The model identified anomalies right away, basing predictions on past transactions. Worldpay also rolled Brighterion AI out to fraud monitoring followed by credit risk management,  alternative payments monitoring. They were specifically interested in Brighterion’s AI ability to gather more insightful, holistic intelligence. Aside from just transaction data, Brighterion AI analyzed merchants’ geographic data, peer analysis, history and time of transactions to determine if an alert was warranted. The more data accrued, the more effective Brighterion became./p

The results

pWith Brighterion’s highly dynamic, real-time AI technology, Worldpay increased its fraud detection and prevention, and incurred far less false positives. As Worldpay set out on a course of massive growth, Brighterion’s proprietary distributed file storage made the platform inherently scalable./p pWith Brighterion technology, Worldpay was also able to increase its organizational efficiency by augmenting employees’ efforts and efficiency via automation. Additionally, the company was able to increase ROI by reducing back office costs and gained autonomy by being able to dynamically incorporate changes as/if needed and test each change./p pBuilding on the success of the AML project, Worldpay went on to expand its monitoring with Brighterion AI to include fraud protection and global risk management for credit risk, delinquency prediction and chargeback prevention, and included its micro-merchants division./p

Metrics

pBy expanding and optimizing the use of Brighterion’s AI across the enterprise, Worldpay achieved:/p ul li20 billion annual transactions/li li20X reduction in false positives/li li1,250X reduction in business rules/li li30% improved adverse reaction rate/li li25X reduction in daily alerts/li li30% increased transaction volume/li li3.2X increased fraud detection/li /ul

The Technology

pWorldpay used Brighterion AI which is powered by “Smart Agents” technology that automatically updates profiles in real time and reliably identifies anomalous behavior through continuous adaptive learning. It requires no database or data warehouse. The distributed architecture allows 10ms response times, end-to-end encryption  traceability, unlimited scalability, resilience to disruption  no single point of failure./p

Disruptive Factor

pThe global payments industry is changing at an incredible rate, with fraud and money laundering crimes evolving even more quickly. To adapt and thrive, Worldpay required technology that would support rapid change and derive solutions to never-before-seen problems. By perpetually monitoring its entire portfolio for risk in real time, Brighterion AI has allowed Worldpay to stay ahead of regulatory issues, prevent fines, protect its merchants from being defrauded and defend its bottom line. Brighterion continues to support Worldpay throughout exponential business growth by providing proactive, scalable risk and compliance AI that will continue to evolve and grow with its needs./p

Shining Moment

pGiven the massive and ever-growing volume of transactions Worldpay handles, the organization knew its next fraud and AML system had to be AI led. What ended up surprising them, however, was all the advantages and cost savings of self-learning, interactive AI. To hear Ian Belsham of Worldpay speak more on this topic, you can view video of him here: a href="https://brighterion.com/resources-materials-research-ai/videos/worldpays-customer-journey-with-brighterion-ai/"https://brighterion.com/resources-materials-research-ai/videos/worldpays.../a/p