The pandemic provided many financial institutions with a digital reality check as they scrambled to accommodate the surge in digital channel usage. As the future of money is changing, this has also presented financial institutions with an opportunity to rethink current technology investments as they adjust their business models and take a step closer to a digital-first strategy.  With an expected increase in digital channel investment, preventing digital fraud while improving customer experience will be the key to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

Mobile apps, online banking, P2P payments, and more are delivering the simple and fast online experiences today’s consumers desire from their financial institutions. However, many fraud detection solutions continue to undermine the customer experience, adding unnecessary friction in the quest to reduce account takeover, new account fraud, and social engineering attacks.

Fraud and security teams are facing an uphill battle as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread around the globe, including the need to secure a remote workforce and protect customers from coronavirus security risks and threats as well as everyday financial fraud, while working remotely themselves. The rapid spread of the virus left organizations little time to prepare, and much has been written about the security concerns of the large-scale shift to a work-from-home world.

When choosing an approach to fraud detection, many organizations are struggling with the most effective path to take. According to Gartner’s Predicts 2020: Identity and Access Management¹ (Gartner subscription required), “a broad spectrum of capabilities is required to create an effective payment fraud prevention strategy for digital B2C channels, including malware and bot detection, device identification, behavioral analytics and transaction monitoring.” 

In our first blog on Money20/20 USA , I reviewed the key messages and challenges presented in Las Vegas and explained key risks to digital identity. These risks that must be solved to enable the future of money are the security challenges surrounding digital transformation and the rise of the synthetic identity problem. My question for today is: What can service providers, vendors and financial institutions do about it? Three key themes were consistent across several sessions I attended.

I’ve attended many security conferences over the course of my career in cybersecurity, but this was my first time at Money20/20 USA. I had to blink a few times when I stepped onto the show’s Expo floor. Did I take the wrong flight and end up at a security conference — or, to be more specific, an Identity conference?