APACS recently announced that a new Faster Payments clearing and settlement service will be introduced in the UK to facilitate near real-time clearing of internet and telephone banking payments and standing orders for UK account customers, scheduled to go live in November 2007. The Faster Payments Service requires Member Banks to clear transactions for bank customers in near real-time. While placing demands on a bank's existing liquidity management, anti-money laundering and accounting capabilities with the near real-time processing, fraud can potentially be a greater issue, especially through the use of Single Immediate Payments generated through the internet and telephone banking channels.

Fractals FP will support both Member and Agency Banks in their efforts to minimize fraud risk and to ensure that customer trust is maintained in the new environment. The move to a near real-time payments environment will create new opportunities for fraudsters requiring banks to be able to cope with constantly changing fraud patterns. Fractals FP uses adaptive technology to track deviation from an account holder's normal payments profile and is ideally suited to monitoring this potentially fraudulent activity.

For outgoing payments, acting on both transactional and customer data, Fractals FP will assess transactions in real-time and present a score back to a Bank's Processing Engine or Faster Payments Hub to use in its decision making process. For incoming payments, Fractals FP will look for suspicious activity on recipients' accounts and warn of potentially criminal behaviour. Ease of connection to the bank's processing systems is achieved through an efficient MQ interface, enabling the high throughput needed for the Faster Payments environment.

"Many banks have been focusing on the need to implement Faster Payments interfaces and are only now considering the implications fraud will have for these new improved methods of payments. Real time fraud assessment will become critical to ensure that Faster Payments does not create any new problems for a financial institution, especially given the need to build consumer trust in these new features," commented Steve Lomax, Head of Marketing at Alaric.

The Fractals FPS system forms the second product from Alaric for Faster Payments Members and Agencies. Previously, Alaric announced the general availability of its demonstrable Faster Payments gateway product, Authentic Faster Payments Gateway.