According to a recent UK Finance report, British banking customers lost £500m to fraudulent schemes in the first half of 2018 alone, the majority of which came from “unauthorised fraud” (i.e., hacking of user accounts.) During these six months, there were 3,866 confirmed cases of vishing (“authorised fraud” or “impersonation”) in the UK, with the scams leading to £36.6M in losses, for an average loss in excess of £9,000 per person.
The problem is most acute in the UK but is not limited to that country. These types of scams are on the rise everywhere. The European Commission has revealed that it is looking into ways to address this vexing challenge. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has reported that 77% of its fraud complaints involve contacts by telephone, of which vishing is a subset. Most recently, the Australian Taxation Office has issued a warning on the rise of this threat.
Payroll systems are the life line of any company or organization. Typically, these systems assemble critical financial functions such as salaries, tax deductions, benefits, business-to-business payments, supplier bills and tax returns.
In recent years, Peer to Peer payments have shown a significant increase, passing the $120 billion mark (2017). Currently, one in three American consumers uses P2P apps to make instant payments to friends, relatives, service providers, or anyone they owe money. Since P2P account opening does not require identity verification, it is vulnerable to various types of fraud and threats including malware, social engineering, remote access, SIM swapping, call forwarding and other techniques. Using these techniques, the fraudsters are able to exploit two main points of failure:
Behavioral biometrics is a breakthrough cybersecurity technology that identifies people by how they do what they do, rather than by what they are (e.g., fingerprint, face), what they know (e.g. secret question, password) or what they have (e.g. token, SMS one-time code). Behavioral biometrics measures and analyzes patterns in human activities. Historically, these included keystroke patterns, gait, signature and the like. Today’s advanced behavioral biometric techniques capture an array of human interactions between a device and an application, such as hand-eye coordination, pressure, hand tremors, navigation, scrolling and other finger movements, etc.
The global insurance market is a multi-trillion-dollar market worth more than $4.5 trillion in gross insurance premiums (2015). In 2016, the gross insurance in premiums in the U.S reached $2.67 trillion with $1.5 trillion in paid claims.
Digital transformation in banking and retail is rapidly evolving. In this fast-moving environment, where finance and fraud intersect, there are several ramifications for financial institutions and the user experience.
The equation is quite simple: where there is money, there is fraud. As the use of mobile banking grows, so do the threats of hacks, malware and other remote attacks. Traditional means of detecting fraud can take considerable time and resources, sometimes taking weeks to detect or to confirm an incident.
In the digital world - whether mobile payments, e-commerce or online banking – this is much too long. Transactions happen quickly, and any delay can have significant repercussions, both from a consumer confidence perspective and a cost perspective. In the digital world, it seems there is always a choice to make between security and the user experience.
With cyber-attackers becoming much more sophisticated, security measures must get smarter too. The key is to implement security measures that continuously monitor and test the authenticity of users in ways that are difficult to replicate. Many experts and market leaders agree: behavioral biometric profiling is the only effective way to achieve this level of security.
