Mastercard Launches Proprietary Tool To Combat Fraud in Payments

Mastercard, the US-based payments giant has been active in the crypto space for quite some time. As the Crypto industry continues to expand, the payment service provider has also done their best to ensure that they have their own territory carved out in this alternative finance industry. In its latest bid to gain ground in real-world adoption of cryptocurrency services, Mastercard has launched a proprietary tool to help combat fraudulent payments. To this extent, the firm launched a new product earlier this week named “Crypto Secure” aimed at helping banks and other clients in its network assess the risk of crime associated with cryptocurrency merchants.

This product is the brainchild of “Cipher Trace”, a blockchain security start-up acquired by the payments giant last year. This service was launched in response to the growing crime rate in the crypto industry and escalating enforcement of compliance measures by various international legal and regulatory bodies across the globe. The California-based blockchain security firm helps businesses and government agencies investigate illegal transactions in crypto transactions. This new product “Crypto Secure” is a tool which uses AI-based algorithms to asses data from blockchain transaction records and various other data to determine the risk of crime associated with crypto exchanges and various other crypto payment platforms in the Mastercard payments network.

This software essentially brings to crypto space, Mastercard’s existing framework to diagnose and analyse payment activity in fiat networks. The tool has a dashboard which displays colour-coded ratings which represent the risk of suspicious activity & transactions with the severity of risk ranging from “Red” for high to “Green” for low. Banks and other platforms which make use of Mastercard’s payment network can use this data to make judgments on whether to accept transactions from certain vendors or decline them. By bringing this infrastructure to the crypto space, Mastercard hopes to bring the same level of trust, transparency and reliability it provides its fiat users to crypto users as well. The firm believes that this move will benefit the firms as much as it does the end users.

The firm believes that with the increase of banks and payment companies entering the fray with their own services for trading and storing digital assets, compliance and safety will become important factors. As more users continued to lose their tokens to various exploits and hacks, such a revolution which increases trust in crypto payments will go a great way in increasing the real-world adoption of crypto use cases. Some of Mastercard’s other notable ventures into the crypto space include

• Partnership with Binance to enable payments in crypto
• Partnership with Bakkt to enable the purchase of NFTs without owing cryptocurrencies
• Deal with NEXO to launch Crypto backed payment cards and deal with the trio — Amber, Bitkub & Coinjar to facilitate payments in cryptocurrency on both its physical and digital cards across the Asia-Pacific region.