Feedzai unifies identity, fraud detection, and anti-money laundering into a single, connected decisioning layer, protecting more than one billion consumers worldwide from fraud and financial crime in real time. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Feedzai Chief Product Officer Pedro Barata to learn more.
Background in Computer Science and Product
Asked about his background, Barata shared:
I’ve spent my career building and scaling technology products that solve complex, real-world problems that help shape a better future. With a background in computer science and software engineering—including an MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MSc in Computer Science from the Universidade de Coimbra—I developed a strong technical foundation early on. Over the years, I’ve focused on translating that technical depth into robust, scalable products that can operate in highly demanding environments.
I joined Feedzai over 15 years ago as a very early employee who played a role in many areas of the company as it grew, and today, as Chief Product Officer, I lead our global product strategy and innovation efforts, developing AI-native solutions that help financial institutions detect and prevent fraud and financial crime in real time. My approach has always been deeply customer-centric, which is where I spent a big portion of my Feedzai tenure. I’m focused on understanding the real risks and challenges our clients face and building technology that delivers measurable impact for businesses and the consumers they serve.
Origins of the Company
Asked how the idea for the company came together, Barata explained:
Feedzai was born from a belief that the same precision and innovation used to solve complex aerospace challenges could be applied to protect the financial ecosystem. Our founders—ex-rocket scientists from the European Space Agency—had spent their early careers solving problems where failure simply wasn’t an option and decisions had to be made in split seconds. They saw an opportunity to bring that mindset to financial services, using advanced data science and AI to tackle fraud and financial crime with a new level of sophistication and scale.
Since Feedzai’s inception, our mission has been to create a world of safer money, one transaction at a time. What started as a vision to detect fraud more intelligently evolved into a broader commitment to safeguarding the entire financial crime lifecycle, providing solutions for real-time fraud prevention through to AML compliance for both transaction monitoring and screening. Today, we monitor 120B events every year and process $9T in payment value. In 2025, we helped prevent $1B in fraud, helping both Tier 1 and smaller financial institutions protect consumers around the globe.
Core Products and Features
Asked about the company’s core products and features, Barata detailed:
Feedzai’s solutions now protect more than one billion consumers worldwide. Our products unify identity, fraud detection, and anti-money laundering into a single, connected decisioning layer that eliminates blind spots as compared with disparate or siloed approaches, enabling institutions to detect complex threats earlier, and our agility means we can adapt controls in real time as attacks evolve. The additional value lies in knowing that customers do not have to deal with multiple vendors, integrating their products and managing change, as all these products are deeply and natively integrated.
Innovation is embedded into Feedzai’s DNA. We maintain a strong global research and development footprint and around 100 patents and patent applications globally, spanning machine learning, risk modeling, federated learning, and real-time decisioning technologies.
Our latest innovation, Feedzai IQ, introduces privacy-preserving federated learning. This approach provides the financial institutions we serve with intelligence from aggregated behavioral and transactional patterns across our vast network without sharing sensitive data. As a result, banks have a view of risk that they cannot produce internally and one that can be used to complement their data (thus getting depth and breadth of attack vectors woven into their risk strategies). Early deployments have delivered up to four times higher fraud detection with 50% fewer false positives, helping uncover fraud and scams that were previously unrecognizable to individual institutions.
Technology Evolution Since Launch
Asked how the company’s technology has evolved since launching, Barata described:
Since launching in 2011, Feedzai’s technology has continuously evolved to meet the realities of a sophisticated and AI-driven threat landscape. Early on, we pioneered an ML-first approach to identify anomalous payment transactions at scale, helping financial institutions spot fraud faster than traditional rule-based systems could and doing so in a transparent manner (by creating what is now called whitebox explanations). Over time, this evolved into a comprehensive AI-native RiskOps platform that spans the full financial crime lifecycle (from trusted digital identity and onboarding to transaction monitoring, AML compliance, and watchlist screening), enabling real-time, context-rich decisions across channels and geographies.
As fraudsters increasingly lean on automation and generative AI, we’ve pushed our technology further through innovations like Feedzai IQ. We’ve also introduced orchestration tools to give banks access to the data they need at the time they need it, and responsible AI frameworks means that we’re doing all of this with strong governance principles and full explainability. Together, these advancements reflect a broader evolution from point-in-time solutions toward a more dynamic, unified platform that’s capable of adapting in real time to new threats and aligning more directly with our mission to make the world’s money safe.
We’re now actively pursuing the promise of Tabular Foundation Models, which is a purpose built derivative of LLMs but focused on financial crime, which is much more challenging given the adversarial and unbounded universe that is payments and fincrime. LLMs are also a source of focus primarily on the post-fraud operations, by automating repetitive work analysts and investigators have to do and a Bring Your Own Agent approach to allow our customers and partners to interact with our MCP layer enabling an autonomous future.
Significant Milestones
Asked about the company’s most significant milestones, Barata noted:
This past year marked a period of strong momentum for Feedzai, reinforcing our role at the center of modern financial infrastructure. We partnered with Mastercard to expand AI-driven scam protection globally and were selected by the European Central Bank as the first-ranked tenderer to power the central fraud detection and prevention mechanism for the digital euro. Feedzai also raised $75 million in new funding, bringing our valuation to $2 billion.
In parallel, we strengthened our technology and ecosystem strategy through the acquisition of Demyst to enhance real-time data orchestration, deepened strategic alliances with partners including PwC, Backbase, and AWS, and launched a Center of Excellence with PwC to accelerate AI adoption across financial services. We also expanded our global footprint by broadening our partner network and opened a New York Innovation Center and U.S. headquarters to work more closely with major banking partners.
Competitive Differentiation
Asked what differentiates the company from its competition, Barata emphasized:
Feedzai protects the entire customer journey — from account opening to login, session activity, payments, and ongoing AML monitoring — within a single, AI-native RiskOps platform. While many vendors focus on isolated touchpoints, we connect identity, behavioral, and transactional signals in real time, enabling financial institutions to detect fraud, scams, and financial crime holistically rather than in silos. Our solution continuously learns what “normal” looks like for each customer, allowing institutions to identify subtle anomalies, emerging scam patterns, and complex cross-channel threats earlier and with greater precision and accuracy.
Through our unique approach to federated learning, we enable financial institutions to benefit from network-wide insights without ever sharing sensitive customer data. While traditional federated learning or data consortiums carry risks around reverse-engineering potential or pooling sensitive data, we’ve combined both approaches’ benefits while eliminating their risks. Instead of relying solely on siloed, institution-specific models, we identify patterns of emerging threats, including AI-driven scams, while preserving data privacy. With fraud becoming even more automated and coordinated, our patent-protected network effect becomes a crucial advantage.
Additional key differentiators that make me proud to work at Feedzai are the people and culture. You can have the best technology in the world, but if there is no trust between the client and the provider, the relationship is destined to fail. At Feedzai, we’re exceptionally proud of our relentless pursuit of customer outcomes, and how we invest in our people to ensure that they can continue to provide the highest level of service and trust to our global customers.
Future Goals
Asked about the company’s future goals, Barata concluded:
We remain laser-focused on delivering reliable AI-powered solutions that detect and prevent financial crime, fraud, and money laundering in real time, so money moves safely. As financial services become faster, more embedded, and increasingly powered by AI, our mission is to ensure that trust keeps pace with innovation.
Looking ahead, we’re building for an agentic world. We’re embedding agentic capabilities directly into our platform to augment fraud fighters and help automate investigations, surface insights faster, and improve both productivity and detection outcomes.
We’re also committed to advancing the broader industry and empowering the global fraud and data science communities. For example, we are investing in and releasing more open-source research, building on over a million downloads of our published work to date. Whether organizations operate within our ecosystem or not, we believe collaboration, transparency, and shared innovation are essential to uplifting the financial system and achieving our ultimate goal, which is to keep people’s money safe.
