The new methods in the fight against online bank fraud

According to Banque de France, 4.7 million cases of fraud, linked to payment transactions, were recorded in 2015, leading to losses of nearly 1 billion euros. At the end of 2016, British bank Tesco Bank was the victim of a cyberattack which affected 40,000 of its customers’ accounts. A post-analysis of the attack has shown that there was fraudulent movements on 9,000 accounts, leading to the online transaction system being frozen for 48 hours and refunds being issued to all affected customers.

It is clear that inadequate management of the risks of fraudulent activity can have extremely damaging consequences: financial impacts of undetected fraudulent transactions, impacts on image, customer confidence, and operations (fraud management unit, crisis management, etc.). Like fraudulent modes of operation, anti-fraud measures must continually evolve, in order to increase effectiveness without affecting customer experience.

To reduce fraud, there are three major threads to be pursued:

• The protection of the customer journey, in order to ensure secure processing of sensitive financial operations through the putting in place of protective measures and the development of customer awareness;
• Fraud detection, whose objectives are to detect both past and ongoing fraud;
• Fraud response, in order to alert, investigate, and respond quickly in the event of fraud, following the alerts raised by detection systems.