Absa Bank, Nedcor Bank and Standard Bank of South Africa are to use neural network technology from Retail Decisions to build a national credit card fraud detection system.
Deployed at a central location by Retail Decisions, the vendor's Prism software will use transaction data provided by Absa, Nedcor, Standard Bank, Diners Club and American Express, to monitor card transactions. The system compares each transaction with historical account patterns and confirmed fraud activity. When the transaction is deemed to be suspicious by the neural network, or if the transaction matches one of the client bank's pre-defined fraud detection criteria, it is routed to a fraud analyst at the client bank for review.
The new service complements Retail Decisions' existing service, Card Clear, which is already in use among banks and retailers in South Africa. Card transactions are screened against the Industry Negative Card File (INCF), a national database of lost, stolen and delinquent cards. Retail Decisions will collate and update the INCF for the banks and retailers using information gleaned from the Prism system. The INCF currently contains more than 2 million records from South African card issuers and over 5 million records from other international card issuers.
Carl Clump, chief executive of Retail Decisions, comments: "We have consistently been looking to cross-market our whole range of services into new territories. The adoption of our Prism service by key players in the South African banking industry is absolutely in line with this strategy."