Building on Bedrock: Welcoming Premkumar Sivakumar to the Anton Payments Advisory Board

There's a version of AI-native payments infrastructure that sounds great in a pitch deck but falls apart the moment real fraud hits it. Adversarial transaction patterns. Identity manipulation. Cross-border risk signals that don't map cleanly to domestic models. The gap between "AI-powered risk" as a marketing claim and AI-powered risk as a functioning system is enormous -- and it's usually only visible to people who've operated deep inside it.

Premkumar Sivakumar has operated deep inside it for over two decades.

We're proud to welcome Prem to the Anton Payments advisory board.

Who Prem Is

Prem's career is a masterclass in building fraud and intelligence infrastructure at scale, across some of the most complex payment environments on the planet.

He started at Citibank in India, where he spent four years in fraud risk management before moving into the Middle East, where he led fraud risk analytics, disputes, and investigations for one of the region's largest banking groups, and then at Etihad Airways, managing payment solutions and fraud risk for a global airline payments operation.

From there, Prem moved into senior fraud leadership roles in Canada, serving as Director of Fraud Risk Management for a leading point-of-sale financing platforms overseeing application fraud and authorization optimization strategy.

In 2022, Prem joined Mastercard, where he served as Director of Product for Cyber & Intelligence, building trust within the market on fraud risk and authorization optimization strategy at the network level. He was subsequently promoted to Vice President of Business Development, focused on risk commercialization and go-to-market - taking Mastercard's most advanced intelligence products and building the strategy to bring them to market.

That is a career built entirely on one thing: understanding how fraud, identity, and risk intelligence operate at scale, in real environments, against real adversaries.

Why It Matters for Anton

Anton Intelligence is the core of what Anton Payments is built on. It's not a feature. It's not a compliance checkbox. It is the infrastructure -- a five-layer AI risk engine that scores every transaction in real time across deterministic rules, anomaly detection, graph intelligence, payee network intelligence, and adaptive recalibration.

Building that kind of system requires more than engineering talent. It requires deep operational knowledge of what fraud actually looks like in cross-border environments, what AI risk models miss when they're undertrained, and what enterprise-grade intelligence actually means when it's under pressure.

Prem has that knowledge. He's led fraud strategy across banking, aviation payments, and consumer lending. He's engaged regulators and executives on risk infrastructure at the highest levels. He brings a perspective to Anton Intelligence that can only come from having done the work -- not just studied it.

Welcome to the team, Prem. Big things ahead.