A member of the Barclays Group, Absa Bank is one of South Africa's largest financial services organizations, serving over 10 million retail banking clients. With the addition of the Absa portfolios, Falcon now protects more than half of the credit and debit cards issued in South Africa.

Due for implementation during 2011, FICOTM Falcon Fraud Manager will support Absa Bank's goals to improve fraud prevention, detection, investigation, recovery and remediation. Absa Bank will use Falcon's real-time fraud capabilities to score debit and credit card transactions as they occur. Based on these scores, Absa will be able to stop the highest-risk transactions if needed, without slowing down transaction speeds for legitimate transactions. This approach has been demonstrated to be a powerful deterrent to fraudsters, who can literally be stopped at the point of sale.

"Our objective is to provide unsurpassed fraud protection to our banking customers," said Paul Mathias, Head of Fraud Risk Management, Absa Group "We chose Falcon Fraud Manager because it gave us the real-time detection we need, and it enables us to manage fraud for all customers' cards from a single platform. As we grow, Falcon's multi-tenant capability means we can easily add new regions. In addition, Falcon's component-based design fits with our IT architecture. This is simply the best system for a growing bank facing today's fraud threats."

"Absa is moving to best-in-class fraud protection," said Mike Gordon, leader of FICO's Global Banking Industry Practice. "Absa's adoption of Falcon 6 will also have an impact on fraud in South Africa. Fraudsters are opportunistic, so we expect some migration of fraud activities as the criminals shift their activities to other banks and other regions."

With the addition of FICO Falcon Fraud Manager, Absa will use FICO technology to manage decisions across the customer lifecycle on its card and retail products. FICO and its South Africa partner PIC Solutions - a leading specialist credit risk solutions company in the EMEA region, with offices in Cape Town, Dubai and Johannesburg - have worked with Absa to deploy FICO Blaze Advisor business rules management system for originations decisions, the FICO TRIAD solution for customer management, and the FICO Debt Manager system for collections and recovery.

"Absa Bank is building a decision management system that will enable it to connect decisions about its customers, to propel growth while managing risk," said Mike Gordon. "Today's credit markets demand a holistic, customer-centric approach, and while nearly all banks are talking about this, Absa is actually doing it."