The company says this move is set to shake up the way banking decision-makers view software licensing worldwide and has left competing system vendors nervous at the prospect of their revenues being eroded by a more feature-rich platform that is free to use.

"Not only is Risk IDS completely free for banks to use but there are many features that simply do not exist in competing fraud systems," says Richard Churchman, the lead developer on the Risk IDS project. "Risk IDS provides a system for transaction fraud, application fraud and money laundering in a single integrated system. Fraud can be managed on different customer accounts yet brought together in a single customer view."

For UK users, Risk IDS has teamed up with the Ordnance Survey to provide actual geographic address positioning to help prevent fraudulent applications. The release of Risk IDS is a boon for the Oracle Corporation as the software is written to work only with its database and high performance PL/SQL language.

"Banks love Oracle! It is considered the industry standard owing to its scalability and uptime," says Churchman. "This drove our decision to develop an open source fraud prevention product working so closely with Oracle. In doing so it has meant that we can leverage Oracle's excellent workflow features, making our software really stand out from the competition. We are very proud to be powered by Oracle."

Risk IDS gets its revenue exclusively from banks paying for consultancy services and customization. There is also a forum which is aimed at academic users or those with a mere casual interest in the project. Uniquely, the consultancy services provide guaranteed return at rates that are around the same as expected from any large consultancy provider.

Currently the software is a Beta release for fraud prevention only, although the company has big aspirations about what the software may eventually do. "We have developed the framework so that the software can be expanded into full bank card processing," Churchman says. "After all, there is so much duplication between fraud prevention systems and bank card processing, it seems silly not to take this approach."

The software is distributed under the CDDL Open Source License, giving Risk IDS credit for the intellectual property while ensuring that the software remains free. To download Risk IDS visit their website.