As transactions speed up, how will banks fight fraud?

Bank of America and U.S. Bank are the latest banks to sign on to realtime payments, joining Early Warning’s clearXchange network earlier this week.

As more banks sign on to the number one name in real-time transactions, the most irksome, time-sensitive financial emergencies may become a thing of the past. Yet it’s also a universally accepted truth that as speed increases, so does fraud.

“It’s a point-well-made that the industry as a whole underestimates the degree of fraud in transactions,” said Lou Anne Alexander, SVP of market development with Early Warning. “We recognize how urgent this is, and are still enhancing the services to anticipate where these threats might come from. [But] part of the combined power of Early Warning and clearXchange is that a wide variety of services maintain continuous identification processes as users initiate new transactions. We’re injecting ID and authentication services into the app, as well as monitoring the transaction set for anomalies and their behavior.”

How fast are the funds actually moving? The transaction messaging may be completed in seconds, but since messaging and settlement are two different parts of the payment process, does the settlement lag behind?

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