Feedzai, the world’s leading risk management platform, announced today that its Q2 2020 has been one of the most successful ever from a new business generated perspective. The company has experienced a +44% growth in new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in H1 2020 when compared to H1 2019. A very successful renewal cycle and new large-enterprise deals closed in the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM, made the first half of the year a success.

Feedzai currently protects companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries. With more than 154M US individual and business taxpayers, almost half of the UK and Canada’s population, and 60% of global music streaming subscriptions being monitored and protected by Feedzai, the company has shown over the years that its mission-critical technology is preferred by the largest and most innovative companies in the world.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Feedzai has seen an increase in financial crime, particularly mule accounts, phishing attacks, employer fraud, and a big spike in fraudulent activity related to online commerce in which people had to significantly rely on during the lockdown.

“Fraudsters thrive on periods of confusion and chaos, and this pandemic represents fertile breeding ground. While many bank capital investments are on hold amidst the economic uncertainty, we are seeing that solutions like Feedzai’s, which reduce fraud losses, decrease operational expense, and improve customer experience through more efficient detection routines are actually seeing increased prioritization for funding, given the increased urgency to protect digital channel transactions in a customer-friendly manner,” says Julie Convoy, Research Director at Aite.

“Feedzai had one of its best quarters ever amid the pandemic, while many industries, unfortunately, showed signs of deterioration. This simultaneously shows that our technology is mission-critical, and our business is crisis resilient,” said Nuno Sebastiao, Co-founder, and CEO of Feedzai.“I’m confident that our next phase of growth will benefit from market conditions in which digital transformation will play a larger than ever role, and from a set of strategic decisions we’ve made in the last 9 months.”

As part of the growth, Feedzai has achieved several important milestones, including:

Business Performance - Feedzai reports a +44% growth in H1 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. The company has also seen Q2 2020 growth above target amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to one of its best quarters ever from a new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

C-suite Strengthening - the company has defined a combination of strategic hires and internal promotions to prepare the organization for the next level of growth

• Amaury Dauge, Chief Financial Officer -joins Feedzai after several C-level roles at Qontigo and previous experience as the CFO of Euronext, the 6th largest stock exchange in the world
• Varun Kohli, Chief Marketing Officer - a seasoned Silicon Valley executive, who has been part of multiple multi-billion dollar exits (8 out of 9 companies he worked at either went IPO or were acquired)
• Richard Harris, EVP of Global Sales - a veteran in both the finance and technology industries, steps in to spearhead the global sales operation after 5 very successful years at Feedzai where he led international operations. Prior to that, Harris held leadership positions at Visa, Experian, and American Express
• Pedro Barata, SVP of Product - after 10 years at Feedzai - hired as one of the first employees of the company - Barata becomes the new product leader after successfully building from scratch the entire Customer Success operation

• Cristina Perez, Head of Legal - joins Feedzai after 20 years spearheading legal, public policy, and regulatory affairs at Vodafone Portugal

Geographic Expansion and Strategic Deals - Feedzai has closed deals during H1 in all of the regions it is currently operating in - US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM - and was able to negotiate multi-year contracts with some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world (e.g. one of the biggest payments processors in the world, one of the top 3 banks in Brazil, one of the big four banks in Australia, the largest national card processor in Europe, and several others).

Cutting-Edge technology- Feedzai continues to pave the way with the most advanced, and promising machine learning techniques built to better protect customers and businesses all over the world. The company also keeps protecting its growing Intellectual Property portfolio with 6 new patents filed in the first half of the year around Deep Learning, Model Fairness Optimization, Active Learning, Transaction Graph Representations, and more. Feedzai will also invest around 26% of its revenue in R&D by the end of 2020, while the average investment made by successful SaaS companies sits at 23%.