News release
Date: 18th July 2006
Alaric announces new Fraud Solution for UK Faster Payments
Alaric's Fractals FP will provide a comprehensive fraud solution - for the prevention and detection of fraudulent transactions - for banks linked to the new UK Faster Payments Infrastructure
London, England - July 18th, 2006. Alaric, a leading supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry, today announced the development of a new version of its award winning Fractals fraud prevention and detection product called Fractals FP.
APACS recently announced that a new Faster Payments clearing and settlement service will be introduced in the UK to facilitate near real-time clearing of internet and telephone banking payments and standing orders for UK account customers, scheduled to go live in November 2007. The Faster Payments Service requires Member Banks to clear transactions for bank customers in near real-time. While placing demands on a bank's existing liquidity management, anti-money laundering and accounting capabilities with the near real-time processing, fraud can potentially be a greater issue, especially through the use of Single Immediate Payments generated through the internet and telephone banking channels.
Fractals FP will support both Member and Agency Banks in their efforts to minimize fraud risk and to ensure that customer trust is maintained in the new environment. The move to a near real-time payments environment will create new opportunities for fraudsters requiring banks to be able to cope with constantly changing fraud patterns. Fractals FP uses adaptive technology to track deviation from an account holder's normal payments profile and is ideally suited to monitoring this potentially fraudulent activity.
For outgoing payments, acting on both transactional and customer data, Fractals FP will assess transactions in real-time and present a score back to a Bank's Processing Engine or Faster Payments Hub to use in its decision making process. For incoming payments, Fractals FP will look for suspicious activity on recipients' accounts and warn of potentially criminal behaviour. Ease of connection to the bank's processing systems is achieved through an efficient MQ interface, enabling the high throughput needed for the Faster Payments environment.
"Many banks have been focusing on the need to implement Faster Payments interfaces and are only now considering the implications fraud will have for these new improved methods of payments. Real time fraud assessment will become critical to ensure that Faster Payments does not create any new problems for a financial institution, especially given the need to build consumer trust in these new features", commented Steve Lomax, Head of Marketing at Alaric.
The Fractals FPS system forms the second product from Alaric for Faster Payments Members and Agencies. Previously, Alaric announced the general availability of its demonstrable Faster Payments gateway product, Authentic Faster Payments Gateway.
About Alaric
Headquartered in London, Alaric is a leading supplier of advanced technology solutions for the card payments industry. Alaric offers java based solutions for card payments authorization and switching, fraud detection and prevention, risk management and payment systems integration. Alaric's customers include First Data International, Swisscard, Cornèr Banca and Yorkshire Building Society. Alaric's product set was launched in 2001. Being written in Java, the solutions are fully portable while scalable to meet the needs of the smallest through the largest institution. Alaric's success is a result of its dedicated focus on the payments industry together with a clear recognition of the need to collaborate with partners.
For further information, please visit us at www.alaricinternational.com