Argyle Data, a leader in real-time fraud analytics for data-driven Hadoop organizations in mobile communications and financial services, announced $4.5 million in additional funding to help companies detect and combat fraud through machine learning and real-time analytics. For the past year, the company has been building its team and developing a product suite using machine learning on a Hadoop stack to deliver applications that ingest data and analyze it in real time, reducing the window for detecting fraud or intrusion from hours or days down to seconds.
We’re at a tipping point in the battle against cyber fraud. It has moved from the back-office to the front page and is now part of the board level agenda as it has a major effect both on the bottom line but also on how customers perceive a company and its brand,” said Argyle Data CEO Tom Ryan. “There is a famous book, What Would Google Do?, and we believe that companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter would approach defeating fraud in a fundamentally different way by exploiting the recent breakthroughs in machine learning, anomaly detection and analytics against massive datasets. Our goal is to take what has already been proven at massive scale and apply it to beating fraud in the mobile and financial services industries.”
Fraud is a massive problem, costing companies worldwide billions of dollars. Mobile communications companies alone lose more than $46 billion each year, while 53% of financial services organizations take up to 8 hours to detect fraud, resulting in billions lost. One of the major problems with fraud detection is the turnaround time. Most fraud detection systems in use today take 24 hours or more to detect fraud attacks, creating a window of opportunity that gives fraud perpetrators the opportunity to steal millions from businesses and individuals. Reducing the time between when fraud happens and when it’s detected could save companies billions of dollars.
Argyle Data monitors and detects fraud in real time by ingesting streaming data into Accumulo, a massively scalable key-value database developed by the National Security Agency, and queries both live and historical data using Presto, a distributed SQL query engine developed by Facebook. Argyle Data has developed a fraud analytics application on this platform that allows attacks to be detected and stopped in seconds using state-of-the-art Adversarial Machine Learning on Hadoop. This supports an ensemble of algorithms that are designed to detect fraudulent activity, at petabyte scale, in minutes versus the traditional 24-hour window.
We’re at an inflection point for cyber fraud detection. The volume of data that we track now exceeds what a human can cope with. Scaling with more humans is simply not the answer,” said Padraig Stapleton, VP Engineering and Operations at Argyle Data. “The answer is leveraging more data, more algorithms and more sophisticated technology, to beat the new breed of organized cyber fraud criminals. My experience in using big data techniques at massive scale convinced me of Argyle Data’s potential to beat online fraud in a dramatically more cost effective way using commodity hardware and state-of-the-art machine learning.”
Argyle Data also announced the hiring of four new executives to help lead. Joining the team is Arshak Navruzyan, Dr. Ian Howells, Padraig Stapleton, and Dr. Volkmar Scharf-Katz. Navruzyan leads product management with an extensive background in machine learning and analytics. Howells leads marketing with over 25 years experience building successful technology companies. Stapleton leads engineering with management and technical expertise across a number of areas including mobile telecommunications and big data. Most recently, he was VP of Engineering and Operations for the Big Data group at AT&T responsible for development of its big data platform. Scharf-Katz leads mobile strategy and solutions with over 15 years of experience in the mobile industry specializing in analytics, big data platforms, and communication technologies. Previously, he was Chief IP Networks Partner, R&D and Head of Service Platform at Vodafone where he was responsible for building advanced computing environments to demonstrate real-time analytics, showcase artificial intelligence and develop mobile applications.
Imagine a credit card company with no fraud protection. No one would trust it or use it. I believe fraud protection is going to be just as critical and expected across all aspects of the mobile and financial services sectors. Fraud directly impacts people’s lives in a very personal and invasive way. I joined Argyle Data to blend my past experience in the mobile industry with the big data and machine learning experience of the existing team to beat mobile fraud and protect customers from the new breed of sophisticated phone fraud criminals,” said Dr. Volkmar Scharf-Katz, VP of Mobile Strategy & Solutions at Argyle Data.
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