Worldpay Invests in Leading Machine Learning Fraud Prevention Company, Featurespace

LONDON, October 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Worldpay, a leader in global payments, is pleased to announce that it has participated in Featurespace Limited's ("Featurespace") latest £16.5m funding round as a new investor, alongside other existing and new investors, as part of its commitment to fast-growing ventures in the payments ecosystem. The round, led by Highland Europe, was also supported by Invoke Capital and existing Featurespace investors such as Touchstone Innovations plc.

Alongside committing investment, Worldpay has formed a commercial partnership with the leading machine learning, fraud prevention company, to help further accelerate the development of fraud prevention services for Worldpay's own merchant customers. As part of the agreement, Worldpay will licence Featurespace's advanced behavioural analytics technology for a number of key use cases, including risk management and fraud prevention for merchants.

Featurespace, based in Cambridge, England, is an Adaptive Behavioural Analytics company that is addressing the fast-growing fraud detection and prevention market, which according to MarketsandMarkets, was worth $14.23bn in September 2017 and is growing at 20% per annum.  

Through the partnership, Worldpay expects to further develop industry-leading fraud and risk management products for its merchant customers around the world through the combination of technology and Worldpay's own Data Science capability and state-of-the-art Enterprise Data Platform. Worldpay also expects to use Featurespace's technology to enhance its own capabilities in areas such as the development of Intelligent Payment services.

Mark Kimber, Chief Information Officer at Worldpay, said: "We are delighted to be partnering with Featurespace, a business with world-class machine learning technology. We are always looking to work with innovative companies and are confident that this partnership will deliver superior outcomes for our customers, by preventing more fraudulent transactions whilst reducing the number of genuine transactions that are declined. We've been incredibly impressed by the evolution of this business and believe it has the potential to grow significantly. With our investment in the company, we are looking forward to supporting the Featurespace team as they grow their business and capabilities."

Martina King, Featurespace CEO, commented: "Following an extensive product Request for Proposal and thorough investment due diligence, we are delighted to be selected by Worldpay.

"Featurespace and Worldpay will combine our considerable technology and experience to protect merchants against the ongoing fight against fraud and risk. We are delighted to welcome Worldpay to our list of customers and investors." 

About Worldpay

Worldpay is a leading payments company with global reach. We provide an extensive range of technology-led payment products and services to around 400,000 customers, enabling their businesses to grow and prosper. We manage the increasing complexity of the payments landscape for our customers, allowing them to accept the widest range of payment types around the world. Using our network and technology, we are able to process payments from geographies covering 99% of global GDP, across 146 countries and 126 currencies.  We help our customers to accept more than 300 different payment types.

For more information, visit http://investors.worldpay.com/media-and-resources

About Featurespace™

Featurespace™ is the world-leader in Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and creator of the ARIC™ platform, a real-time, machine learning software system developed out of the University of Cambridge.

Head quartered in Cambridge, UK, Featurespace has deployed ARIC to financial services and gaming organisations that have services or products deployed in over 180 countries. Customers include TSYS®, Playtech, Betfair, Vocalink Zapp, CashFlows, Camelot and William Hill.

The ARIC™ platform - a real-time, AI software system - monitors individual behaviours and detects anomalies to identify risk and catch new fraud attacks as they happen.