Its decision to implement both Alaric's Fractals (for fraud prevention) and Authentic (for switching) sees Cal join the increasing number of large financial institutions and service providers which are opting for a pre-integrated fraud prevention and payments switching solutions from Alaric.

In recent years Alaric, the international fraud prevention and payment switching group, has been instrumental in modernising the payments industry, with more than 130 businesses using its state-of-the-art fraud and payment switching technology.

Steve Whiting, Business Development Director at Alaric International commented, "This win is very significant for us. Alaric is a rapidly growing payments technology business and we are delighted to add Cal to our growing client list. Being able to provide a tightly integrated, real-time issuer and acquirer fraud prevention solution at the heart of a payments switching system has once again proved to be a decisive factor. The combined Fractals and Authentic solution unites sheer processing power (in terms of transactions per second) with the very high fraud detection and prevention rates made possible using Fractals self-learning detection technology."

The SAFE project is part of a multi-year systems transformation programme at Cal. Drivers for the SAFE project were that existing systems were constraining Cal's expansion, it took a long time to introduce new products and channels to market, the development of standard services was unnecessarily complex and both acquirer fraud detection and in flight intelligent fraud prevention were unachievable using Cal's existing third party fraud detection solution.

Replacing the existing fraud and payments switching solutions was a priority for Cal and Alaric responded by providing an open platform that was quick to implement and can be configured and customized by Cal itself. By using Fractals and Authentic, Cal is now able to intercept and block fraudulent transacctions in flight, using both Cal-defined rules and taking advantage of the highly accurate fraud scores from Fractals intelligent self-learning fraud models.

Steve Whiting further comments, "Independent analysis shows that true real time fraud prevention can lead to a reduction of 25% or more in card fraud losses compared to systems which operate in quasi-real time or slightly behind real time. Fractals is already proving its worth to Cal, enabling Cal's fraud analysts to deploy new fraud rules within minutes and to stop fraud in its tracks, in real time, in flight."

Eran Witkon, Strategic Programme Director from Cal commented, "As part of our strategic systems transformation programme we spent nearly 18 months thoroughly researching the market for an integrated fraud and switching solution, and were delighted to be able to license both systems from a single source, namely Alaric. Authentic and Fractals are modern, open products which come with powerful out-of-the-box functionality." Erez Aharoni, Cal's SAFE Project Architect & Manager, added: "A major positive for Cal is that the products are accessible by our staff, enabling us to make customizations ourselves while retaining all the benefits of using product-based solutions - this greatly enhances our business agility and competitive edge, enabling us to react quickly to changes in our environment and rapidly implement new products and channels."