Mastercard announced plans to acquire Brighterion Inc., a San Francisco-based software company specializing in artificial intelligence.

The Purchase-based global payments company will add Brighterion’s Smart Agent technology to its suite of security products already using artificial intelligence. The Smart Agent technology creates a virtual representation of each customer and builds a profile from the customer’s actions and activities.

“To fully realize the promise of our increasingly digital lives, we need to design our payment systems with the future in mind, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise risk and security for Mastercard. “With the acquisition of Brighterion, we will further extend our capabilities to support the consumer experience.”

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

According to Mastercard, artificial intelligence plays a critical role in enabling consumer convenience while delivering enhanced security. Brighterion’s technology, the company said, delivers greater insights from every transaction to assist in making even more accurate fraud decisions.

“It all comes down to intelligent decisioning at the time of the transaction,” said Akli Adjaoute, CEO of Brighterion, the company he founded in 1999. “We’ve worked with Mastercard over the years to identify patterns and trends to power their most advanced customers’ authorization and decisioning activities.”



The acquisition follows Mastercard’s purchase of Canadian anti-fraud specialist NuData Security earlier this year.