In a landmark initiative to fortify its financial infrastructure against the rising tide of sophisticated cybercrime, Bulgaria’s national payment switch has deployed an advanced, AI-driven platform to protect the country’s entire digital economy. This strategic upgrade, a collaboration between BORICA AD, IT systems integrator IBS, and IBM, moves beyond traditional security measures to create a real-time, intelligent defense system. By embedding artificial intelligence at the core of its payment processing, the nation is establishing a new standard for security, ensuring that banks and payment service providers can offer innovative and safe financial experiences to millions of consumers.
The Challenge of Modernizing National Payment Security
Balancing Speed and Safety
The primary driver behind this technological overhaul was the critical need to reconcile two opposing forces in modern finance: the consumer’s demand for instant, seamless transactions and the imperative to erect an impenetrable defense against real-time fraud. Older, batch-based security systems are fundamentally unequipped to handle the speed and sophistication of today’s cyber threats, which can execute fraudulent activities in milliseconds. For an entity like BORICA, which sits at the heart of the nation’s financial flows, this created a significant vulnerability. The challenge was not merely to stop fraud but to do so with surgical precision. An overly aggressive system risks generating a high number of “false positives,” erroneously blocking legitimate customer transactions. This can lead to severe customer frustration, loss of trust, and ultimately, a negative impact on the digital economy’s adoption and growth, creating a delicate balancing act between robust security and a frictionless user experience.
BORICA’s unique position as a national payment switch, a SWIFT services bureau, and a third-party processor for international card networks like Mastercard and Visa, amplifies the complexity of this challenge. The organization oversees a vast and intricate portfolio of services, making it a high-value target for cybercriminals. Protecting this ecosystem required a solution that could provide a consistent and powerful layer of security across all channels—from card payments to instant transfers—without creating performance bottlenecks. A siloed or piecemeal approach would leave gaps for fraudsters to exploit. Therefore, the strategic necessity was clear: a centralized, intelligent platform capable of monitoring the entire national payment landscape in real time, offering a unified defense that could scale with the evolving needs of Bulgaria’s digital economy and the ever-changing tactics of financial criminals. This holistic vision was essential to maintain the integrity and stability of the national financial system.
Choosing an AI-Powered Guardian
The selected solution, IBM Safer Payments, represents a paradigm shift from reactive to proactive fraud prevention, leveraging a powerful core of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Unlike legacy systems that rely on static, predefined rules which are easily circumvented by modern fraudsters, this platform continuously analyzes immense streams of transaction data to identify subtle behavioral patterns and emerging fraud signatures. It autonomously builds and refines its own complex risk models, enabling it to adapt dynamically and detect novel threats as they materialize. This self-learning capability means the system grows more intelligent with every transaction it processes. Furthermore, it moves beyond simple detection by providing actionable intelligence, recommending specific and immediate countermeasures to security teams, thereby empowering them to respond to threats with unprecedented speed and accuracy. This intelligent, adaptive approach is crucial for staying ahead in the ongoing battle against financial crime.
A critical factor in the selection process was the platform’s immense performance and scalability, which are essential for a national-level implementation. The system is engineered to monitor billions of transactions annually, with the capability to process over 4,000 transactions per second (TPS) at a response time of under 10 milliseconds. This high-throughput, low-latency performance is made possible by a massive parallel computing architecture that offers both vertical and horizontal scalability. In practical terms, this ensures that BORICA’s infrastructure is not only robust enough to handle current transaction volumes without delay but is also future-proof. It can seamlessly adapt to the projected growth of Bulgaria’s digital economy and the increasing demands of its customers, ensuring that security remains a constant, even as the financial landscape evolves and expands over the coming years. This architecture guarantees long-term resilience and reliability for the nation’s payment ecosystem.
A Unified Defense for the Entire Ecosystem
From Implementation to Nationwide Protection
The deployment of the new platform, skillfully managed by the implementation partner IBS, resulted in the creation of a “centralized, multitenant fraud and financial-crime prevention layer” for the nation. Drawing upon their deep expertise in application modernization, IBS ensured a rapid and seamless integration into BORICA’s existing payment workflows, completing the initial deployment in just a matter of weeks. This swift integration was key to minimizing disruption and accelerating the time-to-value for the entire financial ecosystem. The new system provides BORICA with a unified, holistic view of customer behavior across previously siloed channels, such as card payments and digital banking. This single-pane-of-glass perspective is a game-changer, as it allows for the detection of complex, cross-channel fraud schemes that would have been invisible to older, fragmented security systems, thereby dramatically improving the overall effectiveness of fraud protection measures.
The success of the initiative was immediately apparent in its initial phase, which focused on securing card services. The platform now protects over 70% of all domestic card transactions in real time, functioning as a shared national utility for more than 16 participating banks and payment service providers. This shared-service model is a cornerstone of the strategy, as it allows for the consistent application of high-level Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and anti-fraud controls at a national scale, benefiting even smaller institutions that might lack the resources to deploy such advanced technology independently. As noted by Albena Petkova, Director of Financial Fraud Prevention Services at BORICA, this unified approach has already led to a significant reduction in fraud losses. Concurrently, it has improved the overall customer experience by intelligently minimizing the frequency of false transaction declines, thus reinforcing consumer trust in digital payments.
A Foundation for a Resilient Future
The successful implementation of this AI-driven security layer marked a pivotal moment for Bulgaria’s financial sector, replacing outdated legacy systems with a modern, real-time defense. By harnessing the high-performance capabilities of an AI-powered platform, BORICA established a robust foundation designed to uphold the integrity and foster the growth of the nation’s entire digital payments ecosystem. The strategic initiative yielded stronger national AML and anti-fraud controls, boosted operational efficiency, and, crucially, reinforced the customer trust that is essential for any thriving digital economy. This project demonstrated that a centralized, intelligent security infrastructure is not just a defensive measure but a strategic enabler of financial innovation and stability for the future.
