Awards Winner Feedzai: AI-Powered Financial Crime Prevention

Feedzai, a company that provides a platform for financial crime prevention, has been announced as the winner of the AI in Fintech Award at the Global FinTech Awards 2025. 

This award highlights the application of artificial intelligence in the financial technology sector, a field that focuses on expanding access to financial services and improving customer experiences through technology. 

The company's system, which is built on a RiskOps framework, is used by financial institutions to detect and prevent fraud and money laundering. 

Feedzai's technology processes financial transactions to identify criminal activity.

Feedzai reports that its platform protects more than US$70bn in annualised payment volume.

A RiskOps Framework

The company's approach is to provide a single platform for what it terms RiskOps, allowing financial organisations to manage fraud and financial crime risk in one place. 

This model aims to reduce the complexity of using multiple point solutions from different vendors. The growth in digital transactions has generated a large amount of data. 

This data can be used to build a picture of a customer, but it can also conceal criminal activity. 

Richard Harris, Head of Advisory at Feedzai, previously stated in an interview with FinTech Magazine: “The key to success in digitised financial services is identity.

“Using the overwhelming amount of data to confirm identity is the single biggest challenge in combatting financial crime.” 

He added: “The core question we look at in Fincrime is 'are you who you say you are, and do you have permission to do the thing that you want to do?' 

“That's fundamentally the challenge that we're solving for the industry, as identity is more and more complex and fragmented.”

Challenges in AI Implementation

The use of AI in financial services involves specific challenges.

Ensuring ethical, human-centred decision-making is one area of focus. 

As financial services rely on algorithmic decisions for processes that affect people's access to credit and other services, the responsibility to deploy AI ethically is a factor for the industry. 

This includes addressing questions of transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI systems. Pedro Bizarro, Chief Science Officer at Feedzai, previously commented in Critical Future Tech on the components of responsible AI. 

He said: “You have fairness, you have accountability, transparency, you have the explainability part. And in addition to that: it still has to be performant and it has to be cost effective to put the solution in place.” 

He also noted the importance of how errors are distributed, "When we talk about fairness it's how we distribute errors in a way that we are not damaging particular population groups."

AI: the Future of Commerce and Fraud

Recent developments in the sector show a move towards using AI to manage new forms of commerce and potential threats.

 Feedzai was recently selected as the first-ranked tenderer in a framework agreement with the European Central Bank to provide a central fraud detection and prevention mechanism for the future digital euro. 

This project is intended to safeguard transactions by giving payment service providers a fraud risk score to use alongside their own controls.

Nuno Sebastião, CEO and Co-Founder of Feedzai, said of the project: “Being selected as the first-ranked tenderer in the framework agreement to secure the digital euro is both an honor and a responsibility. 

"With tens of billions of transactions expected across the eurozone, success depends on AI that can adapt as quickly as fraud evolves.” 

Nuno also commented on the company’s purpose, stating: “Fraud isn't just numbers on a balance sheet.

 “It's families losing their life savings and businesses losing customers. Protecting people and organisations from financial crime is why we built Feedzai.

 “It's our steadfast mission to keep commerce safe.”