Featurespace, the leading multinational machine learning company for fraud prevention and risk management, has appointed Ritz Steytler as Chief Operating Officer. Ritz will focus on customer support and delivery of Featurespace’s fraud management platform to a global client base.
Ritz has over 25 years’ experience in technology-led transformation and growth of multinational businesses. Prior to joining Featurespace, Ritz worked with private equity as executive-in-residence to acquire and develop businesses in payments, fintech and TMT in Europe. He was a founder of Abacus Partners, a buyout firm focused across these areas.
In 2011, Ritz led Abacus Partners’ acquisition and successful turnaround of omni-channel payment processor PXP (formerly Servebase Global Card Solutions). Following PXP’s acquisition by Kalixa, the payments services provider, in 2014, Ritz served as COO of Kalixa until October 2015.
Prior to Abacus Partners, he spent 16 years as a consultant and systems integrator with Accenture and IBM.
Martina King, Featurespace CEO, commented:
“Ritz’s expertise across the technology sector and particularly strong track record in the payments industry will be extremely helpful as we continue to expand our offering internationally.
“This is the second key appointment this year – Jonathan Crossfield was appointed CFO two weeks ago - and further strengthens the business as we increase the rate of delivery of our leading fraud prevention software to our clients around the world.”
Ritz Steytler commented:
“I have followed the development of artificial intelligence and its use in financial services for some time. In my opinion, there is no company better placed for real-time fraud detection at scale than Featurespace – I am delighted to be part of continuing to build the company’s outstanding reputation for delivering world-class software to its clients.”
About Featurespace
Featurespace™ is the world-leader in Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and creator of the ARIC™ platform, a machine learning software system developed out of the University of Cambridge. The company’s UK HQ is based in Cambridge and its US HQ is in Atlanta, Georgia, with additional offices in London, UK and New York, US.
Featurespace has deployed ARIC to organisations that have services or products deployed in over 180 countries. Customers include Ally Bank, TSYS, Vocalink Zapp, Worldpay, Paddy Power Betfair, Playtech, CashFlows and William Hill.
The ARIC platform, a real-time machine learning software system, monitors individual behaviours and detects anomalies to identify risk and catch new fraud attacks as they happen. The increased accuracy of understanding customer behaviour simultaneously reduces the number of genuine customers whose purchases and transactions are incorrectly declined – a solution that can save the payments industry $16bn annually.