Feedzai - fighting financial crime with a RiskOps approach
Internet crime is perhaps one of the main burdens on the finance industry, particularly in digital banking, which has seen rapid development over recent years. As a result, banks now rely on digital solutions to manage risk and protect the increasing amount of data, transactions, and customer identities.
Digital growth requires dedicated financial protection
Feedzai serves some of the largest and most innovative banks and payment providers across the globe, providing them with solutions to protect against financial crime. Richard Harris, Head of Advisory at Feedzai, tells us how digital transformation has increased the need for better risk management solutions in finance.
“You've got this massive increase in the number of transactions happening digitally, which at the same time creates a vast abundance of data. All that data can create a more accurate picture of your customer, but it can also create a lot of noise to hide criminal activity,” says Harris. “The key to success in digitised financial services is identity. Using the overwhelming amount of data to confirm identity is the single biggest challenge in combating financial crime.”
“The core question we look at in Fincrime is ‘are you who you say you are, and do you have permission to do the thing that you want to do?’ That's fundamentally the challenge that we're solving for the industry, as identity is more and more complex and fragmented.”
Harris puts the current digital risk landscape into perspective as he explains the average American has ten digital devices that are now interconnected and identities—data, personal information, account details—can be accessed from multiple devices. As digital devices multiply, Feedzai provides a complete service, an approach gaining adoption with global banks. Feedzai also goes one step further. By provisioning its entire RiskOps services on a single platform, banks can avoid siloes, reduce costs and share data between use cases.
“Banks are now encouraged to do continuous due diligence on a very regular basis. They're moving from doing this activity periodically to daily. So, having a single platform in one place that can process all that data, keep it all consistent, and remove unnecessary duplication is a game-changer,” Harris says.
Master Identity to deliver better services
Referring to financial crime as a ‘moving target,’ Harris divulges his thoughts on what the industry may face in the next 12 months.
“I think we're seeing a definite shift in the market in terms of the types of activities that are happening. For example, last year for the first time we saw scams overtake ‘card not present’ fraud as the main vector for attacks on financial institutions. That's because it's getting harder to go the typical route of taking over accounts or cloning people's cards. As technology gets better, the weak link becomes the person,” he says.
