As digital payments expand across Latin America, fraud prevention is becoming a technology problem as much as a compliance function. i2c Inc. has been named the Most Innovative Fintech in Latin America in Global Finance Magazine’s 2026 Innovators Awards, with judges recognizing the company’s AI-driven fraud risk management technology for embedding real-time transaction risk assessment directly into a banking and payments platform.

The award highlights a broader shift underway across financial infrastructure: fraud detection is moving closer to the transaction itself.

Rather than relying on separate fraud-management systems that sit alongside payment processors, i2c’s approach integrates machine-learning-driven risk analytics into its unified banking and payments platform. The company says the system evaluates transactions in real time during authorization, allowing financial institutions to make fraud decisions before payments are completed.

That architecture matters as banks, fintechs and digital-wallet providers expand rapidly across Latin America.

Mobile wallets, instant payments, cross-border commerce and digital account opening have created more digital transaction opportunities—and more potential attack surfaces. Fraudsters can move quickly across accounts, devices and payment channels, putting pressure on financial institutions to identify suspicious behavior without unnecessarily declining legitimate customers.

For payment issuers, that creates a difficult balancing act: block more fraud without blocking more customers.

i2c’s technology is designed around that problem. Its fraud-risk management capabilities use machine learning and transaction analytics to support real-time decisioning, while remaining embedded within the same infrastructure used for card issuing, banking and money movement.

Global Finance’s recognition puts that model in the spotlight at a time when financial institutions are reassessing how fraud technology fits into the broader payments stack.

Moving fraud prevention into the payments layer

Traditional fraud systems often rely heavily on predefined rules. Those rules remain useful, particularly for known risk patterns, but they can become less effective as attack techniques change.

A fraud system that operates independently from transaction-processing infrastructure can also create integration and latency challenges. Every additional layer needs to exchange data, make decisions and return those decisions quickly enough to avoid disrupting payment authorization.

i2c is taking a different approach by putting fraud analytics inside its broader processing environment.

The company says this allows financial institutions to evaluate risk at the point of authorization while applying more adaptive models to transaction behavior. In practical terms, an issuer can assess whether a transaction looks suspicious before deciding whether to approve, decline or subject it to additional controls.

That is increasingly important for digital-first banks.

A customer who has opened an account entirely through a smartphone expects a payment to work with little friction. A false decline can be almost as damaging to the customer relationship as a fraudulent transaction is to the institution.

The challenge is particularly acute for fintechs operating at high growth rates, where risk teams need to manage increasing transaction volumes without creating equivalent increases in manual review.

Latin America’s digital payments market raises the stakes

Latin America has become one of the world’s most dynamic regions for digital payments, driven by mobile banking, fintech adoption and the rapid development of domestic instant-payment infrastructure.

Brazil’s Pix is perhaps the best-known example, but digital-payment adoption is also accelerating across markets including Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and the Dominican Republic.

The ecosystem is attracting both established financial institutions and digital-native providers.

For those companies, fraud prevention has to operate across multiple payment types and customer journeys. Card transactions, mobile wallets, account transfers and online commerce can generate different risk signals, while cross-border payments introduce additional geographic and compliance considerations.

This makes centralized risk infrastructure increasingly attractive.

Instead of managing fraud controls independently for each product, an institution can potentially use a common risk layer across its payments and banking operations.

That is one of the arguments behind i2c’s broader platform strategy, which combines credit, debit and prepaid processing with core banking and money-movement capabilities.

The company competes in a market that includes large payment processors and banking technology providers such as FIS, Fiserv, ACI Worldwide, Marqeta and other specialized fraud and payments vendors. Meanwhile, hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services continue to provide the cloud and AI infrastructure on which financial institutions increasingly build their own risk systems.

The competitive question is therefore not simply whether a provider offers AI fraud detection. It is how deeply that intelligence is integrated into authorization, issuing, banking and customer operations.

Qik illustrates the enterprise use case

One example cited by i2c is Qik Banco Digital, a Dominican Republic-based neobank.

Qik worked with i2c to analyze fraud patterns and market trends and develop new rules intended to improve transaction authorization, fraud prevention and chargeback performance.

The bank’s experience illustrates why fraud management increasingly requires segmentation rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Different transactions carry different levels of risk. A familiar customer making a routine domestic purchase should not necessarily receive the same treatment as a newly onboarded account conducting an unusual cross-border transaction.

Qik says its use of i2c’s fraud tools has supported rule design, transaction segmentation and intelligent decisioning.

That approach reflects a wider movement toward risk-based payment authorization, where the objective is to use more transaction context to distinguish legitimate behavior from suspicious activity.

AI does not eliminate the fraud problem

The award should not be interpreted as evidence that AI solves payment fraud.

Machine-learning systems can improve the speed and adaptability of risk decisions, but they also introduce challenges around model governance, explainability, data quality and false positives. Financial institutions must also ensure that automated decisioning fits regulatory requirements and internal risk policies.

The larger shift is toward making fraud detection a continuous part of payment infrastructure rather than a downstream investigation process.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as transaction volumes grow.

Global Finance said its 2026 Innovators Awards recognize banks and fintech companies advancing financial services through technology innovation, infrastructure modernization and customer impact. The publication, founded in 1987, says it reaches readers across 185 countries, territories and districts.

For i2c, the Latin America award provides external recognition for a technology strategy that is becoming increasingly common across financial infrastructure: embedding intelligence directly into the transaction-processing layer.

For banks and fintechs, the practical takeaway is less about the award itself and more about architecture.

As digital payments become faster and more complex, fraud controls that can analyze transactions in real time—and do so without forcing institutions to bolt together multiple disconnected systems—could become an increasingly important differentiator.

Market Landscape

Latin America’s payments market is being reshaped by instant-payment systems, mobile banking, digital wallets and fintech challengers. Brazil’s Pix has demonstrated how quickly a national payment rail can reach mass adoption, while other countries are developing their own real-time and interoperable payment ecosystems.

That growth creates a corresponding demand for real-time fraud detection, behavioral analytics and automated risk decisioning.

The competitive market spans several layers. Core banking and payment processors such as FIS and Fiserv provide transaction infrastructure, while companies such as ACI Worldwide specialize in payment software and fraud-management capabilities. Card networks including Visa and Mastercard also operate extensive fraud and authorization ecosystems.

At the infrastructure level, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS provide AI and machine-learning services that financial institutions can use to develop proprietary risk models.

i2c’s differentiator is the attempt to combine these functions within a single issuer-processing and banking platform.

For enterprise buyers, the decision increasingly comes down to trade-offs between integrated platforms and best-of-breed components. Integrated systems can reduce the number of interfaces and operational dependencies, while specialized fraud platforms may offer greater flexibility for institutions with mature internal risk teams.

The right architecture will depend on an institution’s scale, product mix, regulatory environment and existing technology stack.

Top Insights

• i2c received Global Finance’s Latin America fintech award for AI-driven fraud management, highlighting demand for real-time risk controls across expanding digital-payment ecosystems.
• The company’s fraud technology operates inside its banking and payments platform, allowing issuers to evaluate transaction risk during authorization rather than relying solely on downstream monitoring.
• Latin America’s mobile wallets, instant payments and digital onboarding are expanding the attack surface, increasing demand for adaptive machine-learning-based fraud detection.
• Qik Banco Digital’s deployment illustrates how transaction segmentation and intelligent decisioning can help digital banks balance fraud prevention with customer authorization rates.
• Integrated fraud infrastructure competes with specialist platforms, giving banks a strategic choice between unified payment stacks and best-of-breed risk-management architectures.

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