Mastercard (NYSE: MA) Embraces AI 🤖 to Combat Fraud

International payment system Mastercard has partnered with Feedzai, a company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to combat financial fraud.

Feedzai's technology will integrate directly with Mastercard's CipherTrace Armada platform, monitoring 6,000+ cryptocurrency exchanges to detect suspicious transactions in real time.

The companies aim to combat both fraud and money laundering activities. The move marks a major push from Mastercard into crypto — specifically, efforts to clean the space up of fraud and scams.

The move marks a push from Mastercard into the market for legitimizing crypto as a mainstream financial asset that can be subjected to the same rules and compliance frameworks as traditional assets.

Banks and other large financial institutions have shown increased interest in experimenting with crypto in their products and services. But the next step, deploying commercially available crypto products as part of their core offerings, has proven more elusive.

Banks have been wary of digital assets’ lack of comprehensive regulations and applications in fraud and scams.

Last year, the amount of theft and scams led to a global increase of 79% in crypto-related losses from the previous year, according to data from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. Illicit addresses received $14 billion in 2022 year-over-year, almost twice what they received in 2020.

Price Momentum
MA is trading near the top of its 52-week range and above its 200-day simple moving average.

What does this mean?
Investors have been pushing the share price higher, and the stock still appears to have upward momentum. This is a positive sign for the stock's future value.