From TechCrunch:
Working together at Uber’s risk team, Yifu Diao and Ming Fang came to realize that with the hypergrowth the company was seeing came fraud challenges. Diao’s first project at the company after starting in 2014 was building a rules engine called Mastermind to fight fraud. That engine, he says, allowed risk analysts to build and rollout rules without the help of engineers.
“While it was originally built for fraud, it came to be used for other cases such as safety and customer support also,” Diao said. “It was making 10,000 decisions per second by the time I left.”
When Fang joined Uber’s risk team in 2016, there was a need to use Mastermind at dispatch time — when drivers and riders are matched. However, dispatch was one of Uber’s most critical systems, and it had a much bigger scale than previous use cases while having a very stringent latency requirement.
“Ming [Fang] did enormous optimizations for Mastermind, which enabled this new use case and brought down fraud significantly,” Diao recalls. Mastermind is now used by hundreds of analysts and ops, and it makes real-time decisions throughout hundreds of user touch points.
Continue reading Ex-Uber software engineers raise $3M for Sperta, a 6-month-old startup that wants to help fintechs better manage fraud risk on TechCrunch
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