Fraud: PayExpo 2016

This year at PayExpo the ExCel center in London hosted a number of conferences around a variety of topics which involve the payments industry and expert speakers discussing how technology and products are and seek to change the financial landscape.

With capitalism, comes fraud. It’s a universal truth that if a company, such as a bank, has enough money they will come under attack at multiple points throughout their existence. With the movement towards becoming fully digitalized, businesses are more frequently having to invest in fighting online fraud in order to keep their assets safe.

Cressey’s freud triangle which was used to discuss how fraud comes around.

John Cannon, commercial director for Callcredit Information Group, defined fraud as an “intentional deception for the purpose of personal gain”. This definition of fraud may be very accurate and make sense at face value; however, implementing this type of definition into security programmes to prevent fraud can be problematic.

Customers, both good and bad, have to be identified and that’s something that fraud systems can do. When looking at the different types of customers it’s important to consider the motivations behind the making of a good or bad customer.

“Are they a bad customer because they’re a criminal seeking money for the sake of it? Are they upset? What about identifying those with addiction?” asks Sarah Francis from Polymath Consulting.  On the flip side it’s important to determine what makes up a good customer.

On the other hand, Francis states that a good customer is someone who “spends lots, regular and someone who is reaching their spend potential”. In order to do this a company has to profile a person’s risk, loyalty, method of payment and country of spending. These are important equations that determine whether a person is committing fraud and whether the business is getting the most out of that customer and vice versa.

Joshua Bower-Saul, CEO of Cybertonica, states that “fraudsters are a negative customer segment” in business and the problem companies, in his eyes, are that they’re using statistical based fraud-prevention technology. This is when he outlined how his companies’ new tech which seeks to dramatically decrease fraud.

SMARTPAYER, an Artificial Intelligence and machine learning system form Cybertonica, aims to increase conversion while obliterating fraud. One of the most frequent issues with the majority of fraud systems currently is the system giving false positives, thinking there’s fraud when there isn’t. This increases basket loss, customer waiting times, friction with payments and decreases the customer’s experience significantly.

The way in which Cybertonica’s fraud prevention system seeks to use transactions, biometrics if needed and browsing histories as a foundation of information on spending behaviours and other analyses on a customer’s behavior to determine the risk factor.

One of the most exciting aspects about the AI’s features is having a “real-time dashboard which makes it marketable and offers better service”. The offerings a dashboard can have for customers and businesses alike are countless, from seeing patterns, collecting data and analyzing what is and isn’t selling.

Reports from the businesses that are currently using SMARTPAYER it has been reported that they’ve experienced around 80% less fraud and increase of around 30% conversion rate. With results such as this coming in and the fact that they “are ready to play in PSD2” according to Bower-Saul, the security industry is certainly going to be disrupted by this company.