SEB is an Estonian bank owned by the Swedish bank SEB (Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken SA) and a member of the international SEB Group (formally known as Eesti Ühispank until April 2005).

Earlier this year, SEB Estonia recognized the increasing need for faster monitoring of fraudulent activity in its banking systems - with the goal to detect and prevent fraud in real-time. Building on a longstanding and highly successful relationship with Progress Software using the Progress SonicMQ messaging product, Progress Sonic ESB service bus, and Progress OpenEdge application development platform for its core banking systems, SEB selected the Apama CEP platform to enable fraud detection and prevention in their banking patterns.

The Apama CEP solution will enable SEB Estonia to detect any unusual behaviour that might occur in systems such as Automated Teller Machines (ATM), Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS) transactions and the potential hacking of banking systems, in real-time. Previously, the bank had a team of five people dedicated to detecting fraud and it would take four-to-five hours to verify whether the activity detected was of a fraudulent nature. With the Apama solution, the bank is able to perform the same activity within 5-10 minutes.

Ain Rasva, Vice President and CTO, at SEB Estonia commented: "With banking cyber crime on the increase, it's more important than ever to ensure we can detect and verify fraud as soon as possible, for the benefit of both our customers and us as a business."

"The Progress Apama CEP platform has allowed us to build our own real-time rules where we can decide what we want to monitor and when. The system allows us to be operationally responsive, giving us the ability to improve operations as well as offer a better service to our customers."

The Apama product allows SEB Estonia to be one step ahead of the fraudsters. Real-time data flow will allow the bank to monitor fraud and detection as it happens, giving the company the ability to focus efforts to customer needs.

Dr. John Bates, Chief technology Officer (CTO), Progress Software, commented: "Banks need to be quick off the mark when dealing with fraudulent activity. It's not good enough to be spotting a scam transaction that happened hours ago. In today's climate, where fraudulent activity is rife, it's important to have the correct systems in place to monitor, detect and react immediately."

The project went live in September.