| Tech geek Dave Excell left Canberra in 2004 for Cambridge University intending to do a PhD and enjoy life in the ivy-clad cloisters. But things didn’t go quite according to plan.
It’s a classic start-up tale: a bright idea that takes wing on several gusts of serendipity. But it is told against a backdrop of the gothic spires of Cambridge, where his company,Excell’s doctorate was going to look at how computers might be trained to look at the world the same way as humans.Sitting in the café of a shared-workspace building in central London, he explains his erstwhile scholarly passion.
They were looking at computer games and how to tell whether a player was genuine or a cheat, someone trying to game the system. Then came the really lucky break.Cambridge has a reputation as a hothouse for scientific and tech innovation, which lures companies to regularly jump on the train up from London to scout for ideas that are still in bud.
“That’s where we really started to learn the craft of preventing fraud. And we gained an understanding that market opportunity and how the technology could be applied there.”One thing they learnt was that fraudsters move quickly, adapting to detection systems and bypassing them. This forces companies to rejig their products, leaving cat and mouse trapped in a vicious circle.“We flip the focus around and say, well, 99.
Back in 2005, banks were using fraud detection systems geared to the offline world. These were cumbersome, slow-moving and generated too many false positives – which led to many legitimate transactions being blocked as potentially fraudulent. His dad worked for Microsoft in the 1990s, and Excell says he’s always imagined following in his footsteps by getting involved in a West Coast tech company as it put pedal to the metal.
Because some of its customers are payment companies such as TSYS and Worldpay, which serve a wide range of banks and finance firms, Featurespace claims more than 97,000 financial institutions now use Featurespace tech.