The European Central Bank has selected Portuguese AI firm Feedzai (with PwC) to build fraud-detection for a potential digital euro, part of a multi-year experimentation and vendor-selection program.
What’s new
The ECB awarded Feedzai an anti-fraud contract (framework up to ~€237.3M over four years, with an initial estimate near €79.1M) to score transactions and spot anomalous behavior in real time. It’s one of several digital-euro contracts the ECB is staging while it continues pilots and legislative work.
Why it matters
- Risk & trust: Fine-grained fraud scoring is table stakes if a retail CBDC is to gain consumer trust without sacrificing UX.
- Data minimization vs detection: Expect heated debate around privacy, opt-in telemetry, and model transparency as the ECB weighs rollout options.
- Timeline realism: Even with vendors in place, the public launch hinges on EU lawmaking and member-state infrastructure readiness.
Context
The ECB has been running staged experiments with industry since 2024–25 to test features like conditional payments and offline modes. Feedzai’s selection extends that work into production-grade fraud tooling. For our broader AI-safety lens, see NPUs: the point—or the problem?.
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