Absa joins top fraud protection system

23 Dec 2010

FICO, a US based company providing analytics and decision management technology to protect credit and debit cards issued in South Africa, has announced that Absa is adopting the Fico Falcon Fraud Manager 6 to control fraud in its debit and credit card portfolios in real time. This brings its market share up to more than 50% in card fraud detection.

Due for implementation during 2011, the system will support the bank's goals to improve fraud prevention, detection, investigation, recovery and remediation through its real-time fraud capabilities to score debit and credit card transactions as they occur. Based on these scores, the bank 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 this system 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, the system's multi-tenant capability means we can easily add new regions. In addition, its 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 Global Banking Industry Practice. "The bank's adoption 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."

FICO and its South Africa partner PIC Solutions have worked with the bank to deploy its Blaze Advisor business rules management system for originations decisions, the Triad solution for customer management and the Debt Manager system for collections and recovery.

"The bank is building a decision management system that will enable it to connect decisions about its customers, to propel growth while managing risk," adds 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."

Around the world, 17 of the top 20 credit card issuers rely on the Falcon system to protect transactions for more than 2.1 billion active card accounts.