Stuart Burrell

Director of AI Research and Innovation VISA

Stuart Burrell is Director of AI Research and Innovation at Visa, where he leads the Frontier AI Unit within the Risk and Security AI Lab. His team develops next-generation machine learning systems for Visa's global payment network, focusing on large-scale payments foundation models, multimodal reasoning, fairness, robustness, machine-generated text detection, and adaptive AI under distribution shift. His team's work spans theoretical AI foundations to practical deployment, with research publications at venues such as AISTATS and ICLR and production models that protect billions of transactions. Prior to joining Visa, Stuart was an AI Research Scientist and Engineer at Featurespace, a machine learning start-up specializing in fraud detection and financial crime prevention, which was acquired by Visa in 2024. Stuart holds a PhD in Pure Mathematics from the University of St Andrews and an MPhil in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge.