The past year has been good for Nethone, a leading provider of AI-driven Anti-fraud and Business Intelligence solutions, and 2018 looks even more promising. They have just received a head-spinning subsidy of $4,45M (over 16M PLN) from Poland’s National Centre for Research and Development (NCRD) to conduct two advanced R&D projects. They will focus on fraud prevention and anti-doping solutions for e-sports.

Financial institutions face a lot of dangers, phishing attacks and data breaches being just one of many examples. No wonder the demand for reliable and user-friendly solutions is so high. Nethone can just be what they need. The company aims to create Nethone ATO, an autonomous AI-based cybersecurity solution that would protect financial institutions against account takeover attacks (ATO). It will guarantee threat detection accuracy and a full automation of anti-ATO processes. The system will also be based on machine learning, so it will develop as you use it.

“In recent years, banks and other financial institutions have been implementing diverse technical and procedural solutions to prevent ATO attacks, such as multiple-factor authentication tools, fraud monitoring systems, daily transaction limits, and so on. Unfortunately, none of those strike the balance between customer-friendliness and security,” said Hubert Rachwalski, COO Nethone.  “The goal of Nethone ATO is to leverage our experience, expertise and technologies to create an innovative solution enabling truly accurate and outstandingly reliable verification of the account holder’s identity without interfering with user experience. Thanks to NCRD, we can achieve this goal much faster than initially expected.”

The second project Nethone is working on is a an anti-doping solution for e-sports. With the rapid development of e-sports business the number and frequency of cheating attempts is rising at an alarming rate. Young or old, we all love games. And nothing spoils the fun like unfair play. In e-sports it takes a form of placing additional pieces of code in software which increase the players’ abilities: they can move faster, see more of the map, have an increased field of view, aim more accurately, etc. Unfortunately, it’s hard to prove it. That’s why Nethone teamed up with DaftMobile, a Warsaw-based company specialized in developing mobile games and utility applications, to create a matchmaking and anti-doping platform for e-sports, Elympics.

“E-sport is becoming more and more popular, not only among players but also among viewers and, in consequence, investors who want to get a piece of this profitable pie too. Big money always attracts fraudsters and cheaters. Even if the scale of the problem in the case of mobile e-sports is not large yet, we aim to nip it in the bud. We have decided to join forces with our partners from DaftMobile to combine their rich experience in the field of mobile games development with our expertise in data science and cybersecurity,” comments Hubert Rachwalski, CEO, Nethone.

Elympics will use advanced Artificial Intelligence and in-depth behaviour analysis, such as biometrics and pattern recognision to analyse behaviour, skills and history of every player. Thus, it will be able to match them with opponents of comparable parameters and to accurately recognise forbidden practices. Nethone and DaftMobile plan to distribute Elympics as a universal Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows it to be integrated with existing products or create an entirely new game. An additional advantage is that Elympics promises to reduce the cost of game development, which will encourage more businesses to invest in the gaming industry and thus contribute to its development.

Nethone has been in many prestigious accelerator programmes and received many awards. It is certainly one of the leading FDP company in the CEE region and there’s no doubt that we’ll see more of it in the future.