Dave Excell is the founder of Featurespace, the Cambridge, England, company whose software helps banks and payment firms spot fraud and money laundering. He started it in 2008 to turn his doctoral research on human behavior into a commercial product, and Visa bought it in December 2024. Read our review of Featurespace.
A PhD at the University of Cambridge
During his PhD he worked with Professor Bill Fitzgerald at the University of Cambridge, applying machine learning and statistics to human behavior. Companies brought the group problems to solve, and in one project they modeled the decisions of players in a computer game to tell genuine players from robots cheating the system, he told Unite.AI.
The more projects he did, the more he saw a need for models that adapt as the behavior behind fraud or cheating changes to avoid detection. That idea became Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, the first core technology of Featurespace.
Learning Good Behavior Instead of Bad
Older fraud systems learn known patterns of bad behavior and look for them again. His approach does the opposite: the model learns what normal behavior looks like for each customer and flags changes from it. Featurespace later added Automated Deep Behavioral Networks, a recurrent neural network design that understands the timing of transactions.
Joining Visa
When Visa completed the purchase, he said, "We developed our innovations to help crack even the most complex fraud cases. As part of Visa, we will be able to set a new standard in AI-powered fraud prevention," according to Visa's announcement.
