Fraud and defaults on payment cards are on an upward trend. According to the EU Fraud Prevention Expert Group, some 500-1,000 million euros are lost annually in card fraud across the EU alone. Moreover, fraud is not just a financial problem - it also seriously damages a bank's brand and reputation.

It is therefore imperative that institutions take a proactive approach to card fraud prevention and default risk management, trapping errant transactions at the earliest possible moment in the authorization process. Institutions must be able to react instantly to changes in their risk environment and be able to create and deploy authorization rules within minutes to counteract incipient fraud trends.

User configurable rules are hard to implement in legacy systems

Most institutions with well established card authorization systems lack the facility to dynamically create and deploy such authorization rules and are faced with the prospect of having to wait weeks or months for rules to be hard coded into their systems, potentially leaving fraud losses to mount unchecked.

Authentic Gateway adds rules capability to existing systems

An alternative approach is to leave the existing authorization essentially unchanged and to tightly integrate it with a high performance rules processing engine, which enables transactions to be authorized, referred or declined in real time.

With Alaric's Message Mapper product at its core, Authentic Gateway may be readily integrated with any existing authorization system, enabling the addition of authorization rules capability to the legacy application while preserving the investments already made in such systems.