7 Ways To Keep Your Customers Safe With A Holistic Fraud Protection Plan
With so much innovation occurring in the financial space — mobile wallets, digital payment services, and new authentication methods for online banking to name just a few — a holistic approach to both fraud and authentication is needed in order to protect your customers. Yet getting that big-picture view requires a real-time, customer-centric fraud prevention plan that not only thwarts fraud, but also removes the friction your legitimate customers experience across channels as they make transactions and access their funds.
Here are a few tips that you, as a growth-oriented financial institution, can use towards implementing such a plan.
Consolidate Your Fraud And Authentication Management Systems
Multiple systems mean mega operational inefficiencies. They also mean higher fraud losses as important signals fail to be properly handed off between them, inconsistent decision making, unnecessary roadblocks to adopting better fraud prevention technologies, and customer disruption. All of these can be avoided by moving to a single comprehensive fraud detection solution.
Bottom line: it’s much easier for your analysts to see the whole picture when that picture isn’t fragmented across multiple silos.
Monitor The Entire Payment Lifecycle
By scrutinizing the whole process from transaction origination at the retail or commercial channel to the exit onto the payment rails, you make more data points available for your fraud detection models to act on, and more points at which you can interdict in the event of an account takeover.
Select A Fraud Management Solution That Is Flexible Enough To Handle Many Types Of Transactions
You need to be monitoring all the various card-based transactions (including debit and credit cards, digital wallets, and prepaid cards) in addition to EMV and more traditional PIN/Signature models. Not only will this help you keep up with the fraudsters who are learning to exploit the vulnerabilities created by the evolving digital banking environment, but you’ll gain a more holistic view of your customer as well, by monitoring their activity across multiple accounts. Such cross-channel monitoring enables your tools to extract deeper insights by seeing specific transactions in the context of the customer’s other activities.
Monitor The Full Wallet Lifecycle
You’ll need to monitor and protect the full range of your customers’ transactions, from the initial provisioning of the card or account, person-to-person transfers, card present and card not present purchases, and bill payments. The rationale is the same: even the most advanced machine learning-powered anomaly detection systems perform better when given a more complete baseline of normal behavior to judge against.
Don’t Neglect Inside Threats
Fully protecting your bank’s assets and your customers requires identifying employee collusion, fraud, and non-compliant behaviors. This is one key area where advanced profiles and behavioral-based analytics can really shine as a tool that helps you build appropriate investigation cases against employees by discovering collusion and relationships.
Adopt A Holistic And Comprehensive Authentication Management Strategy
As a financial institution in the era of fintech, you are facing a flood of disruptive authentication technologies, with each innovative approach promising simplicity for the customer and yet greater protection against fraudsters. Since there’s probably no one silver bullet when it comes to authentication, you’ll have to utilize a combination of the best methods in a unified, risk-aware approach. This will be critical to striking the right balance between security and usability — a tough needle to thread since customers want faster access to their funds, limiting the amount of time to detect fraud.
Keep The Customer In Focus
Protecting your customers from today’s fraud threats is a tough and ongoing challenge. So is keeping them. None of the above advice matters much if your fraud protection and authentication measures are perceived as intrusive or inconvenient. This means you must deliver faster transaction and payment times, as well as minimal friction during the transaction as well. This is one of the key drivers of process and analytics automation in the financial crime prevention space, as it holds the promise of faster, more accurate decisioning for increased customer satisfaction.
Many of these suggestions can be implemented by adopting a robust fraud detection solution, built upon advanced analytics, automation, and machine learning. In addition to preventing reputational damage and reducing losses from fraudulent transactions and regulatory fines, such a platform can keep your customers safe by supporting your holistic fraud protection plan.