Betfair extends Featurespace contract

Online gambling group Betfair has signed an extended five-year anti-fraud technology partnership with Cambridge University-associated Featurespace, the company disclosed this week.

The two companies have been working together successfully for the past five years, allowing fraudulent behaviour to be predicted and identified in real time by analysing relevant data.

The extended partnership includes an upgrade to Featurespace’s ARIC engine, first deployed in 2008. The company claims that its upgraded system brings with it, for the first time, “infinite horizontal scalability”.

Featurespace’s Adaptive Behavioural Analytics approach to automating the problem of fraud detection can continue to run in real time, even with Betfair’s constantly growing customer base, a company spokesman said. This will allow for peaks in events such as the Grand National to be handled without having to resort to manual review and rules-based systems.

Using Featurespace’s ARIC technology, Betfair is able to analyse millions of transactions per day, helping it to identify unusual behavioural patterns and spot customer fraud, thereby saving Betfair costs in risk management.

Martina King, CEO of Featurespace, told Computer World this week: “Fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated, so companies need a solution that keeps them ahead, identifies new types of fraud, and reacts to it instantly – closing the door on vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.”

King says that Featurespace has used Bayesian inference and machine learning, with ARIC predicting individual and group behaviour.