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Jason Blackhurst serves as Senior Vice President & Head of Featurespace & Acceptance Risk Solutions at Visa, leading the payments industry’s one of the trusted fraud prevention technologies into its next phase of development. With over three decades of experience in finance and e-commerce industries, Blackhurst provides valuable insight to a position that combines technical expertise with building partnerships. The focus of Blackhurst’s work is centered on fostering trust in the payments landscape, along with equipping merchants and financial institutions against potential fraud threats.
Jason Blackhurst received his education in Business Administration from Warner Pacific University, between 1995 and 1997. This set the stage for his career, which would eventually include working in banking, electronic commerce and enterprise risk management. Before becoming a businessman, he spent six years in the United States Navy. This period provided him with the disciplined mindset of mission-focused leadership that became his hallmark for the rest of his career.
Jason Blackhurst has been with Visa for more than ten years, in his current position as SVP Innovation and Strategic Partnership. Previously, he served in the post of SVP eCommerce Product Executive at Bank of America from 2008 to 2015 and prior to that he served in various leadership positions at Vesta, Polestar Communications and Concentrex that were geared towards online banking and world-wide operations. After the acquisition of Featurespace by Visa in March 2025, Jason Blackhurst took up the position of CEO succession in Featurespace and Acceptance Risk Solutions after retiring Martina King, a long-serving CEO.
Featurespace enhances Visa’s global risk infrastructure through the use of artificial intelligence-based fraud prevention technologies, which include Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, Automated Deep Behavioral Networks, Card Fraud and Scan Detection.
Adaptive Behavioral Analytics: The main advantage of Featurespace lies in its self-learning platform which allows for detecting and stopping any fraud in real-time through Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, allowing to create individual behavioral profiles for each customer and detecting any anomalies.
TallierLTM™: It is claimed to be the world's first generative Large Transaction Model which can be described as self-supervised as it is pre-trained on billions of transactions in order to find hidden patterns of fraud which cannot be detected by any other models, providing 71% improvement compared to any other industry's standards.
Automated Deep Behavioral Networks: A Deep learning architecture is based on recurrent neural networks which upgrades the Deep Behavioral Networks and improves its ability to provide protection from all sorts of scams, account takeover, and card and payments frauds.
Card Fraud: The solution was purposefully designed for the card and payments industry and it allowed some partners, such as TSYS, to reduce fraud losses by 39% and false declines by 70%.
Scam Detect: This product is designed to address the increasing danger of Authorized Push Payments by offering adaptive capabilities to banks which are updated constantly to stay ahead of fraudsters.
Featurespace has become a globally recognized fraud and financial crime prevention platform and is expanding its enterprise footprint through Visa’s support and ecosystem. It has also strengthened its Cambridge, UK presence by signing a six-year office lease, signaling long-term commitment to its home base. In addition, Featurespace has broadened its transit payments capability through Visa Ready for Transit, bringing in multiple technology partners to support contactless public transport payments worldwide.
There have been no serious public controversies associated with Jason Blackhurst. Throughout his career, he has built a reputation as a steady, experienced operator across banking, e-commerce, and payment risk technology, culminating in his current leadership of Featurespace within Visa's global risk and identity solutions portfolio.
