Fraud Management Technologies (FMT) today announced FraudAlert, the company's flagship product designed to reduce the burgeoning rate of increasingly sophisticated online fraud while protecting the main attraction of online banking and retailing - its convenience and ease of use.
FraudAlert, which utilises proprietary technologies from FMT, has already been selected by three leading global financial institutions and is attracting worldwide interest due to its effectiveness in reducing fraud while not burdening the customer with the complexities of some additional security solutions. This highly-effective solution is being made available today as a software solution from FMT, or alternatively in conjunction with IBM as a plug-n-play appliance or a hosted solution.
FraudAlert uniquely achieves to reduce online fraud while protecting the customer by using multiple risk parameters that profile each end-user's behaviour and analyse each action or transaction via its internal risk-based authentication engine. Each action a user seeks to take is analysed in real-time and accordingly, FraudAlert can automatically request further multi-factor authentication options from the customer, or engage human intervention from the bank to secure the transaction.
The online channel is considered a strategic direction for most organisations in the financial services industry and with online banking and e-payments now considered mainstream. Fraudsters continue to challenge the ongoing viability of this channel by conducting online fraud via identity theft and account takeover using well-established techniques such as phishing and pharming. Of even greater concern is the emergence of new, highly sophisticated fraud techniques now being utilised such as Remote Access Trojans (RATs), 'Smart Redirection Attacks' and key-logging. As a result, customers are understandably growing increasingly concerned at the levels of fraud being exposed and are questioning the safety and integrity of remote channels. In order to reduce the extent of fraud and to reassure the general public, regulators in many markets, including the USA, are asking financial institutions with online banking capability to assess and provide better security for their customers.
FMT founder and CEO, Kostas Siourthas, explains: "When an account is opened, transacted or serviced through the Bank's traditional channels, varying identification and authentication policies are put in place by the banks to protect their assets and their genuine customer. What FraudAlert does is allow all financial institutions to deploy existing and new policies to their online channels, which today are more critical to their operations than ever before".
The value of FraudAlert is in the protection of the customer experience, which is very significant in today's financial services industry. Increased levels of security often result in a compromise of the levels of convenience currently experienced by the customer and may subsequently lead to a decrease in the use of the online channel. The headaches of greater operational expense using face-to-face delivery channels or customer attrition are perhaps larger risks for financial institutions.
"Our solution alleviates this dilemma for the bankers - the increased security offered by FraudAlert allows the customer to be protected in a non-intrusive manner that leaves the customer experience unchanged in a highly competitive and volatile customer market."
Siourthas continues: "Deployment of FraudAlert demonstrates that the concerns the customers have today about the integrity of the online channel are being taken seriously and that the financial institution values the security and protection of the customer."
FMT's FraudAlert prevents and detects online fraud for financial institutions. This happens firstly at account opening or application and at two further separate points: (1) when a user seeks to access the banking website and (2) when an action or transaction request is made.
An action could be a change of address or a PIN change. A transaction could be a bill payment or a new third party payment request. FraudAlert identifies online fraud patterns in real time and implements the appropriate risk-based authentication solution to help reduce the risk of each action or transaction to the genuine customer and the bank. FraudAlert includes sophisticated proprietary
technology including a bank-controlled rules and policies editor, a detailed case management system for fraud monitoring and investigation, and a user-friendly administration tool. FraudAlert also offers Reverse Authentication allowing a bank to identify itself to the customer across web and telephony channels which is important in the fight against fraud via social engineering.
This affordable solution can reside completely within the banks network either as a software solution or as a plug-n-play appliance, which can be hosted at a bank's preferred data centre.
Large-scale pilots of FMT's FraudAlert fraud prevention software have been running successfully for over twelve months, and the technology is currently in use by three leading financial institutions in the UK and Asia.