TSYS Harnesses AI to Transform Financial Fraud Prevention
In an exclusive interview with FinTech Magazine at Money20/20, Dondi Black, Chief Product Officer at TSYS issuer solutions, reveals how the company has transitioned from theoretical planning to practical implementation of AI across its solutions portfolio.
Revolutionising Risk Management
Central to TSYS's strategy is its centre of excellence focused on generative AI applications. “Inside Global Payments, one of the best things we've done in the last year is to form a centre of excellence focused on generative AI,” says Dondi.
“It's also a framework for creating governance and standards oversight to ensure that as we apply it, we're weeding out any bias, risk or unfairness.”
The implementation of AI-powered adaptive behavioural analytics has already demonstrated a significant return on investment in fraud prevention, particularly in detecting unusual transaction patterns.
This capability has become increasingly crucial as new payment methods and channels emerge in the financial services sector.
- Merged with Global Payments in 2019 in US$21.5bn deal
- Processes billions of transactions annually worldwide
- Acquired NetSpend for US$1.4bn in 2013, expanding into prepaid debit cards
- Established new AI centre of excellence in 2023 focused on fraud prevention
Predictive Analytics Evolution
The company has developed sophisticated proprietary predictive models focusing on portfolio metrics such as churn risk and credit risk, partnering with Featurespace to leverage their TallierLTM solution.
This collaboration enables TSYS to enhance its fraud detection capabilities by pulling data from multiple sources to identify genuine transactions more accurately.
“By embedding AI adaptive behavioural analytics into our fraud and risk tools, we find that we are far more effective,” says Dondi. “Our issuers are far more effective at detecting anomalies, patterns, and trends more quickly than rules-based systems of old.”
The system's ability to adapt to changing customer behaviour patterns has proven particularly valuable.
“When you apply generative AI, you can actually pull data from numerous sources and identify what is more likely to be a genuine transaction,” Dondi explains.
“It's removing friction where it isn't necessary, but introducing the right amount of friction in the right way at the right time.”
Looking ahead, TSYS continues to explore new applications for AI across its operations, including enhancing call centre efficiency and customer service delivery.
“We've curated a number of use cases that are going to be really important,” says Dondi. “The one I'm most excited about is what we're doing in our data and analytics space, where we're able to test out and prove the predictive accuracy of our models.”
“Inside Global Payments, one of the best things we've done in the last year is to form a centre of excellence focused on generative AI”
Global Payments: Achieving scale
TSYS, the issuer solutions division of Global Payments following a US$21.5bn merger in 2019, has evolved from its origins as a division of Columbus Bank and Trust in Georgia and is now part of one of the world's largest payment technology companies.
Global Payments has grown through strategic acquisitions and international expansion, establishing operations across Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Global Payments is a leader at the intersection of software and payments, generating roughly US$9bn in revenue annually. The company supports over 5 million business locations across over 100 verticals, and more than 1,900 leading financial institutions globally.
Global Payments processes more than 75 billion transactions a year and has 830 million traditional accounts on file.
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