Why Every Bank Needs a Proven Fraud Protection Solution

Why is cybercrime so rampant and why are cyber-criminals able to conduct successful attacks on even the most recent payment schemes?

The answer lies in the shift of cyber-criminals banding together to act like businesses, enabling them to escalate financial fraud into ‘cyber-crime as a service’. Just as digital technology allows banks and financial institutions to provide customers faster transactions across multiple platforms, including mobile devices, it also allows criminals to deploy multiple attacks to multiple targets with just a push of a button. Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a perfect example of a tactic cyber-criminals use to send blasts of false emails directing employees to misdirect funds or change banking account information. Even with a low success rate, multi-pronged attacks like these are still lucrative for criminals.

No payment method is safe from cyber-crime attack. Checks (74%), ACH transactions – both off and online (55%), wire transfers (40%), and commercial credit cards (34%) are all targets of cyber-criminals and the number of attacks is rising year after year. In fact, 30% of organizations reported an increase in experienced fraud attacks in 2019.

It may seem like it’s all bad news when it comes to fighting financial crime. But there are ways to protect your organization against BEC and other types of cyber-attacks while preventing the diversion of funds into the accounts of bad actors. In fact, according to the 2020 Treasury Fraud and Controls Survey, organizations with payment fraud detection solutions in place that incorporate interdiction technologies see 75% fewer losses in certain types of fraud.

The importance and effectiveness of a payments fraud prevention solution is further illustrated by the following real-world examples of customers who trusted Bottomline Secure Payments to protect their financial institutions and customers from cyber-criminal attacks.

Although these featured banks had very different profiles, the requirements for a fraud prevention solution were the same:

• Proactively detect and prevent payment fraud attacks
• Employ rules-based detection and behavioral profiling
• Generate real-time alerts for suspicious events

In the ongoing fight against fraud, an award-winning community bank regularly evaluates its fraud prevention measures to ensure it has the strongest defenses in place to protect customers and their funds from multi-faceted cyber-attacks.

This community bank partnered with Bottomline to digitally transform their product and services offerings and simultaneously ensure the latest fraud prevention measures are deployed to deter cyber-criminals.

The digital transformation journey began with the bank adopting Bottomline’s Digital Banking IQTM, a customer-centric digital banking and payments cloud solution that provides cash management capabilities, allows for payments innovation, and enhances customer relationships with rich insights derived from data analytics. The out-of-the-box solution includes Secure Payments, Bottomline’s cyber fraud and risk management enterprise solution for financial institutions.

The bank understands the importance of risk-scoring payments, so Bottomline worked with the bank and its e-banking software provider, to make the integration seamless with the ability to risk-score Fedwire payments that are processed through the bank’s 3rd party Payment Hub. The bank also needed the ability to risk score and identify anomalies in ACH files that are processed independent of the e-banking solution (“offline” ACH).

One major advantage of Digital Banking IQ and Secure Payments is that they are designed to work together out of the box and do not require any integration effort, customization or tailoring. This minimizes the effort and time to get to going live and of course, makes Secure Payments a very cost-effective solution. Instead of installing and deploying, the solution can be activated and onboarded which lowers the total cost of ownership. The bank enjoyed another major advantage of Secure Payments: its ability to risk score based on a “bigger picture” of payments arriving from multiple additional online and offline channels, this robust capability helps detect sophisticated fraud schemes that span multiple channels.

The solution also provides a consolidated view of alerts in the proprietary Investigation Center, a powerful forensics web-based user-interface, allowing investigators to manage and document the investigation process, view all information relevant to alerts, cases or profiles with flexible drilldown options on each related entity. And with the Secure Payments hosted in Bottomline’s cloud, the bank has peace of mind that any security updates and enhancements would be taken care of automatically.

In this second example, the customer is a global commercial bank with a banking network that spans 6 continents. In addition to the objectives above, the bank was also looking to consolidate disparate fraud solutions into one enterprise fraud management solution. This consolidation would give the bank a holistic view of all payments activity across all locations – equating to an exceptionally high volume of daily transactions, more than 1 million. This would allow for a more accurate and efficient risk-scoring process to detect and block anomalous activity before funds could be diverted.

Like the community bank previously referenced, this global commercial bank chose Bottomline for its online banking needs, and added Secure Payments to protect its multiple channels (ACH, Bacs, Wires, check and more) in the US and across the globe. Unlike the community bank, this financial institution started with hosting Bottomline’s Secure Payments on its on premise, private cloud and is now planning the transition of the solution to the Bottomline cloud.

At every phase of the project, Bottomline and the bank held design sessions to clarify the bank’s objectives and tailor the solution and recommend added services as necessary to meet those objectives. Once the scope of the project was outlined, the deployment of features was prioritized to maximize value and efficiency. Training was also provided to empower the end user teams to be self-sufficient once the solution was live. Bottomline and the FI designed the phases in a way that constantly added business value with minimal risk.

With Secure Payments in place, the bank is monitoring the majority of payment activity and transactions throughout the enterprise. The behavior of customers, employees and other users is tracked and profiled by the analytics engine which correlates the activities between Bacs, Wire and payments. When suspicious activity is detected, real-time alerts are generated and displayed in the Investigation Center, which provides a centralized dashboard for ease of review by its Fraud Investigative Unit.