US Debit Card Fraud

Banking institutions’ strategies have developed dramatically over recent years. The huge growth in individual current accounts has been accompanied by an increased use of debit cards – now being widely used by current account holders at the point-of-sale and at ATMs worldwide.

The growth in retail banking accounts, together with widespread consolidation in the industry and the merging of smaller banks into larger entities, have been highly beneficial trends for both banks and their customers. But it has also introduced an Achilles Heel into the banking system by creating the precise conditions in which organized criminal gangs involved in card fraud like to operate.

The medium-sized U.S. banks are those most affected by the debit card fraud phenomenon. Unlike larger banks, they do not necessarily have the detection measures already in place to combat these new card attacks. Moreover, they such institutions usually do not have the volume of transactions to enable custom fraud detection models to be created based on neural network technologies. Until the introduction of Alaric’s Fractals product, such institutions have been forced to rely on rules-based systems which offer moderate fraud detection effectiveness as compared to the use of intelligent technologies.

Alaric’s fraud detection solution, Fractals, directly addresses the needs of mid-size institutions, providing customized, accurate and effective fraud detection models in a way which is simply not possible using conventional fraud detection technologies. Thus, Fractals is a powerful tool on combating debit card fraud.