Real-Time Fraud Defense at National Scale

BORICA AD, Bulgaria’s national payment operator, processes high volumes of card and digital transactions across issuing and acquiring institutions. As fraud attacks became faster, more automated and cross-channel, traditional rule-based controls struggled to keep pace.

How do you stop sophisticated fraud in milliseconds without disrupting legitimate transactions?

BORICA faced increasing fraud pressure, rising customer expectations and the need to protect national payment infrastructure with sub-10ms decisioning. False positives risked customer friction, while missed fraud meant financial and reputational exposure. To remain resilient, BORICA required a scalable, real-time fraud prevention platform capable of adapting to evolving attack patterns without compromising performance.

BORICA partnered with IBM and implementation partner IBS to modernize its national fraud prevention architecture. Together, they deployed IBM Safer Payments as a centralized, multi-tenant platform replacing legacy batch-based systems with real-time behavioral risk scoring.

IBM Safer Payments provides in-memory processing, machine learning-driven detection and horizontal scalability to support high-volume transaction monitoring. IBS integrated the platform directly into BORICA’s payment workflows, enabling real-time decisioning across participating banks and PSPs.

The deployment transformed fraud monitoring from fragmented, institution-level controls into a shared national service model. Manual rule updates and delayed reviews were replaced with automated, real-time scoring and centralized risk governance.

With IBM Safer Payments, BORICA now protects over 70% of domestic card transactions in real time, supporting 16+ banks and PSPs on a shared national platform. The system processes 4,000+ transactions per second with sub-10 millisecond latency, enabling consistent fraud and AML controls across participating institutions. What was once batch-based and fragmented is now centralized, automated and behavioral risk-driven. BORICA can scale fraud prevention across institutions, extend coverage to instant payments and digital channels, and adapt faster to emerging threats. IBM and IBS continue to support BORICA’s expansion, strengthening Bulgaria’s national payment resilience for the future.

BORICA AD is Bulgaria’s national payment switch, founded over 35 years ago and headquartered in Sofia. Owned by 19 banks, BORICA operates the country’s payment infrastructure, providing card services, instant payments, SWIFT bureau services and third-party processing for Mastercard and Visa, serving banks, payment institutions and the public sector.