Metavante Technologies Inc. says it is developing new ways to detect and prevent fraud in its payment and banking systems.
The Milwaukee vendor said that it plans to integrate real-time monitoring of transactions, using analytical software from the Actimize unit of Nice Systems Ltd.
Gary Bakker, the president of Metavante's risk and compliance solutions division, said the Actimize software would first be put to work in its online bill payment business, then would be introduced to other payment and banking systems.
"Monitoring for fraud with a single, interconnected view moves us toward providing fraud reporting to our clients in a single, enterprise-wide report covering all product lines," Mr. Bakker said in a press release last week, when the company announced its licensing agreement.
As the payment business has become more complex and faster, with checks clearing as images or being converted to automated clearing house transactions, banks and industry organizations have stepped up their fraud-fighting efforts.
For example, Nacha, the electronic payments association, since December has been developing a database of suspect ACH originators that it plans to share with the industry, and the Federal Reserve banks changed their rules in July to hold banks liable if they accept deposits of remotely created checks that are later found to be fraudulent.
Metavante said it plans to offer the Actimize monitoring to the institutions that use its systems for core banking and for payments. Though Metavante historically best known as one of the largest vendors of core banking products and services, more than 60% off its business today is payment-related.
Real-time monitoring will enhance existing risk management processes that it already provides to its client base, a group of more than 8,000 financial institutions in the United States and abroad, Metavante said.
The company said it wants to move beyond the reactive fraud response and would use this software as an element in a broader set of enterprise risk management, regulatory compliance, and anti-money-laundering technologies.
Metavante said that Actimize's software has the ability to "learn" as it goes. Suspect transaction patterns discovered in one payment channel or banking service can enhance the fraud prevention rule set for all channels, it said.
As the software continually refines its analysis, Metavante said, it and its clients will be better able to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions before they are posted to customers' accounts. It also will be able to reduce the time spent on "false positive" transactions.
Actimize, a New York software developer, was bought in the second quarter of 2007 by Nice Systems Ltd., an Israeli company that monitors customer interactions across channels. Actimize says its systems are used by six of the top 10 global banks and eight of the top 10 U.S. brokerages.
