How Crelan will use AI and machine learning to monitor and detect online fraudulent transactions

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As online transaction volumes are increasing worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so do new fraud threats. Banks typically rely on past patterns of behaviour to make predictions and detect fraud. But as new patterns emerge, it is becoming a more complicated process, especially with the surge of real-time payments. Moreover, an IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study of 500 FSS executives shows that it generally takes more than four weeks to discover a new fraud pattern, and another four weeks to adjust the scoring engines.

Thanks to IBM Safer Payments solution customers can rely on a safe handling of payments. IBM Safer Payments applies AI and machine learning to learn from past transactions to generate best-fit rules that fraud analysts can use to optimize existing models or build and deploy new models in minutes, as opposed to weeks. As a result, card issuers & acquirers can optimize their fraud management to attain higher fraud detection and lower false positive rates.  The solution was awarded in September 2020 the Fraud Prevention and Detection product of the Year by Risk.net Asia.

Tackling transactional online fraud

In the fall of last year Crelan and IBM signed an agreement for the integration of the IBM Safer Payments fraud detection solution underlining Crelan’s continuous focus on tackling transactional online fraud and monitoring Crelan’s cashless online channels in Belgium. The IBM solution enables Crelan to keep up with the highest standards and to react quickly to new types of fraud techniques without external or data scientist dependencies. It comprises the analytics and simulation tools needed to continuously monitor business performance and adapt the decision model to emerging and modified fraud patterns.

“Fraud prevention continuously needs attention for maintaining a safe payments environment. That’s why Crelan continues to invest, in order to safeguard and protect her customers assets and interests. Therefore, we strengthened our current collaboration with IBM as trusted partner, enhancing our current solutions and bringing us a more performant regulatory technology in the industry, levering artificial intelligence and machine learning. This investment is a continuity of the roadmap that we have laid out in the past months for further investment in our technology landscape”, says Anne Fievez, CIO at Crelan.

“Losses from online payment fraud continue to mount, from $22B in estimated losses in 2018 to $48B expected losses in 2023 (Source: Juniper Research). IBM Safer Payments uses artificial intelligence designed to deliver insights and to quickly adapt to a changing threat landscape. This technology is already yielding successful results for FIS (USA), STET (Carte Bancaire France) and some of the world’s largest and most complex payment portfolios.” says Dominique De Coninck, Financial Crimes Insights Leader in IBM Europe.