Featurespace's Queen's Award honours legacy of co-founder

Proud moment for team

Fraud detection pioneer Featurespace has received its Queen’s Award.

The Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, Julie Spence, presented the award to CEO Martina King at the company’s Cambridge headquarter’s at the Hauser Forum.

Featurespace, which span out of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering in 2008, uses machine learning technology developed by the late Prof Bill Fitzgerald to detect fraud and manage risk.

Widely employed by the gaming industry, Featurespace’s adaptive behavioural analytics are increasingly also used in the finance and insurance industries.

The company earned its Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category.

“Protecting our customers from fraud attack is incredibly rewarding work,” said Martina. “Receiving the Queen’s Award for Enterprise is recognition of our achievements and a testament to the intelligence, hard work and dedication of our team and customers.

“To be recognised in the Innovation category speaks to the quality of our invention. We were the first company to apply machine learning and anomaly detection to differentiate between good and bad events, in real time, for fraud detection and prevention. Our invention is Adaptive Behavioural Analytics, which is delivered on our ARIC platform.

“Using our ground-breaking technology, we developed an enterprise fraud hub. Customers asked us to develop an automatic system to identify fraudulent activity at the moment it occurred while simultaneously reducing the number of genuine customers blocked by less intelligent systems. Customers across the world in financial services, insurance and gaming sectors have rewarded us with their business.

“Machine learning innovation from Cambridge University, combined with the support of our team and customers has led us to this incredibly proud moment in our company’s history.”