With the incorporation of Alaric's new Java-based Adaptive Classification Engine (ACE), Fractals 2.1 now provides banks across the world with highly effective fraud detection systems, capable of adapting quickly to identify rapidly changing patterns of fraud.

With Fractals 2.1 both large and small banks can now benefit from customised and highly accurate fraud detection systems based on their own historical data and particular anti-fraud parameters. This advance greatly increases the probability of early, accurate fraud detection and prevention. Also, with today's accelerated rate of change in fraud patterns, it is vital for banks to update models frequently. Until now, most banks have only been able to do this typically every six months or, at best, every quarter. With Fractals 2.1, banks can now update in a matter of hours, at a frequency of their choice.

"The rollout of Chip and PIN in the UK is likely to migrate fraudulent activity on UK cards to overseas locations," says Daniel Hurst of Alaric's Fraud Detection Solutions Group. "Therefore, we will probably see a much higher level of fraud in the international cross-border transactions. Another possible consequence of Chip and PIN is that Mail-Not-Received or Card-Not-Present fraud may increase. Fractals 2.1 automatically identifies emerging patterns and ensures that the fraud detection engine is always current."

ACE provides banks with a powerful tool for executing decisions in real-time as particular patterns arise in their transaction data. Its flexible and open framework gives users much more control over the fraud detection models than available in other solutions, and enables banks to migrate their internally developed detection models to an online transaction scoring environment, if they so wish.