Is data the answer to fighting fraud in today’s world?

Amidst the massive explosion of consumer, payments and transaction data, the question remains: how are we going to safeguard this stuff?

According to the Nilson Report, credit card transactions rose 28 percent, debit card transactions 46 percent and electronic transactions 45 percent between 2010 and 2015, for a collective increase of 34.2 billion transactions annually. That was before it was possible to use your Fit-bit to buy a kale juice. In addition to volume, the variety of transactions is also exploding. Mobile wallets, the IoT, P2P networks, digital banking – all of these contribute to greater complexity.

The good news? Credit unions have more member data than ever before. The bad news: as we have all witnessed, keeping massive stores of fast-moving, complicated data safe isn’t easy.

Detecting fraud is a significant challenge. Why? Existing fraud detection has trouble “seeing” the transactions coming in. Data is also disjointed, lowering the level of detail and making it difficult to perceive trends.

 

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