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Chana Schoenberger (00:11):
Hi, I'm Chana Schoenberger. I'm the editor-in-chief of American Banker and I'm here at Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco where all week we've been talking to payments leaders about what's going on in the payments space. And I have with me here Umar Farooq, who is the global co-head of J.P. Morgan Payments. Welcome.
Umar Farooq (00:27):
Thank you very much for having me.
Chana Schoenberger (00:29):
One of the things we've talked about at this conference extensively is the growing wave of payments fraud. Everyone on stage in my panel yesterday had a personal story about ways that payments fraud had affected them. Including me, I got a credit card stolen last week. It happens. Sorry. It's fine. The bank was totally-
Umar Farooq (00:44):
Hopefully you're with Chase because we take good care of you, but anyway.
Chana Schoenberger (00:47):
I do have a Chase card. This was not a Chase card, but it was not a problem. But what are you doing to fight this growing daily?
Umar Farooq (00:54):
I mean, this is an ongoing battle to be honest. So there's all sorts of ways we've fought fraud and a lot of fraud, especially in the large institution area, is us avoiding losses to our clients. They're not usually bank losses. So you have someone who gets, they lose their password, someone comes in and does a wire out of them or they get spoofed because someone sends them vendor payment instructions and then they basically send the payment out. Then they realize four days later that it's actually not a vendor, it's a fraudster. So we have a full sort of suite of things at the very back end. We've been using AI and machine learning to actually build rules utilizing data that comes out all the time. So it's constantly learning. And so it will trigger alerts when things are out of whack, out of patent, things you haven't done before.
(01:49):
And it's a real hassle for clients too, because we basically would go out to the client and say, "I think this is a little suspicious. Do you want to do it? " And there's been times when we've had to call clients two or three times and they've still greenlit the payment and then they discovered the next day it was a fraud. So there's those sorts of capabilities. We also have built quite a bit of infrastructure to do account validation and entity verification where we utilize the data we see because we see a vast amount of US bank accounts and we see a lot of payments. We get a lot of inbound data, we have EWS and Lexus and like a lot of other sources. So we basically build scores and we even provide that information to the US government in some cases to avoid fraud for payments out of the US government in quite a big way.
(02:40):
And I think finally we are also looking, we've been looking to work with other banks because in some ways this is a shared problem. So if we discover something and if we share it with someone else, it's a net benefit to the system, but it's no detriment to us. So I think it's various efforts. I think last year we avoided more than 500 million of fraud for our clients.
Chana Schoenberger (03:03):
Wow. Yeah, that's a lot. Okay.