Metavante Incorporates Actimize Fraud Tools

The race to empower banks with enterprise fraud-fighting chops stepped up last week when Metavante announced a partnership with NICE-owned Actimize to provide banking and payment clients with fraud monitoring and reporting technology. While it will roll out first with Metavante’s online bill-pay offering, it will eventually be utilized across all its core processing and payment solutions, according to the company.
Actimize’s analytics engine tracks down suspicious banking transactions and patterns that can be transposed into fraud prevention rules that run across all lines of business at an institution. What makes this important is Actimize being one of the leading vendors in preventing insider fraud—one of the banking’s industry’s primary fraud problems. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiner’ 2008 Report to the Nation reports that 15 percent of all occupational fraud losses occurred within financial services; banks were also second among industries with a median loss of $250,000 per incident.
As if to underscore the problem, Metavante’s announcement came the same week that UK bank Abbey discovered that two of its branch workers had pilfered £120,000 (more than $218,000) from ATM machines over an 18-month period. Their method of operation? The two would unlock the machines and steal  cash in incremental amounts of between £500 to £10,000—making the getaway home each day by stuffing the loot down their pants (er, “trousers”…pardon our Yankee accents). It took awhile, but the persistent cash shortage finally triggered enough suspicion to warrant a hidden-camera investigation.