It’s getting to be a busy time for Brighterion, the fraud prevention engine at the heart of MasterCard MA +0.84% Worldwide and of WorldPay, the largest card acquirer in Europe.

The company says there is a “huge business need for inexpensive, adaptable, real-time, cross-channel fraud detection and prevention solutions. However, most existing solutions are built on antiquated technologies such as business rules, neural networks, data mining and statistics. Decision trees are stagnant while fraud schemes continue to evolve.”

Its relationship with MasterCard began in 2004 when the card company, dissatisfied with its fraud prevention system for detecting too few frauds and creating too many false positives — denying a purchase to a legitimate customer with a valid credit card — invited software companies to show what they would do with two years of anonymized MasterCard data.

“We were 4 times better at detecting with 11 times fewer false positives,” said Dr. Akli Adjaoute, founder and CEO of Brighterion. “MasterCard said that was impossible and ran four more tests in Switzerland, Italy and the U.S. and every time we were at least 3 times better than other software, with fewer false positives. They wanted 400 transactions per second with less than 100 millisecond delay; we provided that. Now we are up to 6,200 transactions per second with less than 10 milliseconds latency.”

MasterCard not only acquired the technology for its real-time scoring, it invested in the company and took a board seat, he added.

Brighterion uses what it calls Smart-Agent technology. It “learns and tracks the specific behaviors of each entity (cardholder, merchant, device, etc.). As it learns from each entity’s individual activities, the Smart-Agent updates relevant profiles and makes effective changes at runtime.” Using a variety of techniques simultaneously, it learns, predicts, infers and makes intelligent real-time decisions.

“It allows one-to-one profiling of entities. This allows it to track every merchant, every card and every device in real-time…The agent follows the unique behavior of the entities and pulls data from across multiple channels to produce an extremely robust virtual profile that automatically aggregates all available data and refreshes itself in real-time by profiling the behavior over 1 to 24 months.”

The company’s development team spent more than 10 years making the design of models transparent and easy to use.

Brighterion says its software is the only product on the market with the ability to identify and stop, in real-time, previously unknown fraud schemes. It combines anti-fraud with other products for compliance and iDetect for security — it would have detected the Target TGT +2.55% breach, Adjaoute said.