Picture this: Someone presents a bad check at a teller station in a branch. Once it is identified as fraudulent, investigators can quickly find a video image of the fraudster by searching for the transaction amount or number, grab the biometric identifying characteristics of the perpetrator and then search through video files from the bank's other branches to see whether he or she has been there as well. And all this data can be packaged and given to law enforcement to aid in prosecutions.
"When a fraud takes place, we knew it'd be nice to see in one snapshot what's going on, and be able to do the cross-functional searching," said Bill McNamara, the $1.9 billion-asset bank's senior vice president of technology and security.
The security system pairs data from 18 surveillance cameras with facial and image recognition software from 3VR Security Inc. and ties the teller-station video directly to the transactions being conducted at the time.
Besides providing evidence after the fact, the system can be used proactively to spot known fraudsters when they visit a branch to open accounts with fake identities or to identify VIP customers who might merit expedited service.
The impetus for the project, which the Danbury, Conn., bank announced in October, was an update of a 4-year-old surveillance system that McNamara said did not capture enough data to be truly useful in investigations.
The bank also wanted to monitor all of its sites from a single workstation so it could better respond to robberies or fraudulent activity. It got all that, but observers said that the customized integration into its core banking system took the project to a new level of utility.
"Let's face it, one of the problems with fraud and security in general is, everything is working in silos and is not interconnected," said Forrester Research analyst Ellen Carney. "To connect these three components here is [a] very powerful solution."
The customized integration of Fiserv Inc.'s Cleartouch teller system with the 3VR data was made easier by the fact that each branch's video log data is maintained locally as well as in the core system.
The integration took a few months, and Union Savings Bank's request was the first for Fiserv. "The novelty about this is being able to take all the information the bank has — the surveillance video, the facial recognition and this other data on teller transactions — and having the ability to map that digital data, pull them together and get more value out of it," said Tom Knapp, Fiserv's general manager for Cleartouch.
McNamara's role as senior vice president of technology and security at Union Savings may have played a part in his ability to imagine, then execute a project that integrates physical security systems with traditional bank information technology. This is not the norm at most banks, where recent Forrester Research data found that 34% of IT security teams had no responsibility for physical security and only 7% were fully responsible for physical security.
Return on the bank's $275,000 investment is being measured in several ways. First, its performance is measured against the efficiency and data-capture goals set at the outset: The time spent investigating specific fraud incidents has been reduced by 75%, and the amount of video surveillance captured has grown by a factor of 80.
The benefits are also being seen on the balance sheet: Using the integrated surveillance and recognition system tied to the Fiserv teller application and adopting policies and enforcement actions helped drive fraud losses to an all-time low of 0.0005% of assets last year, a 90% reduction from the previous year, McNamara said.
