Feedzai Enhances RiskOps With ScamPrevent as US Sees a 30% Increase in Scam Losses

Feedzai, a provider of financial crime and risk management solutions, has announced significant enhancements to its RiskOps Platform. This enables banks to better protect their customers from a wide variety of financial scams. These new Feedzai ScamPrevent capabilities deliver detection, classification, and interception of the widest variety of payment scams and financial fraud typologies.

Financial scams are an epidemic growing in both dollar volume and human impact. The FTC recently reported that between 2021 and 2023, losses from scams increased by 30 per cent in the US.

According to data from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), globally, only seven per cent of scam losses are reported, making these losses only the tip of the iceberg. With scammers having access to generative AI using large language models (LLMs) to craft increasingly sophisticated and realistic scams, we can only expect these losses to increase.

Most financial institutions employ multiple legacy point solutions that use rules-based approaches to identify different types of fraud, but fail to specifically target scams. These traditional approaches have three critical limitations:

1. They are siloed by channel, so they are susceptible to fraud typologies that operate across multiple banking products or payment platforms.
2. They identify fraud by either focusing on behavioural activity (such as biometrics, app and device usage patterns, malware incidence, and network activity), or financial activity (transactional data across one or more banking channels and platforms), but they don’t natively look at both together, which significantly limits the ability to rapidly diagnose a scam in progress.
3. They don’t quickly evolve to protect against new types of fraud as scammers continuously change their tactics.

Ensuring scam detection

Feedzai’s RiskOps platform employs a unified AI model. It builds a 360 degree view of customer risk, monitoring a customer’s behaviour and financial activity across the widest span of banking channels. Feedzai’s ScamProtect capabilities build on this unique RiskOps approach to enhance the platform’s ability to identify and intercept scammers before their crimes impact customers, with:

• Improved AI-based detection. Significant improvements to Feedzai’s AI engine, based on learnings across multiple geographies and financial institutions, enable improved scam detection with reduced false positives.
• Custom scam rules. New capability to add bank-specific scam detection rules and thresholds on top of out-of-the-box AI detection delivers a rapid and customized response to new scam attacks;
• Early intervention. Digital signals, including behavioural biometrics and other non-transactional patterns, may suggest a customer could be a scam victim prior to them actually making a payment. New Feedzai features empower banks to identify these signals and create intervention and education opportunities earlier in the risk lifecycle.
• Inbound payments. To benefit from a scam, a scammer has to send money to an account they can control. New features enable monitoring of inbound payments as well as outbound to give banks multiple opportunities to stop a scam.
• Extended scam reporting. Customisable scam classification, performance metrics, and reporting.

We need solutions now more than ever

“Consumer losses from scams are expected to surge as countries introduce or expand instant payment channels – like the US will do this year with the introduction of FedNow,” said Pedro Barata, chief product officer of Feedzai. “The human impact of scams is particularly high as scammers tend to target vulnerable groups – the elderly, the economically disadvantaged, immigrant communities, and youth.

“As making payments becomes faster and easier, the need for new solutions that enable the detection and interception of scams before any money moves are growing. With our new ScamProtect features, Feedzai delivers the industry’s most comprehensive approach to scam prevention.”

Assigning responsibility for scam losses

Recent data from McKinsey shows that when a customer is impacted by a scam, it is a make-or-break moment for their banking relationship. Their research shows that the difference in Net Promoter Score (NPS) of customers that had a “good” experience versus a “bad” experience when impacted by fraud was a massive 132 points. This data strongly suggests that banks that succeed in protecting their customers from scams will increase customer satisfaction and retention, while those that fail will see increased churn.

Increasingly, consumers hold banks responsible for personal losses stemming from scams. In the US, a recent survey conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Feedzai found that 76 per cent of respondents were very likely or somewhat likely to leave their bank if the bank did not refund them for losses they incurred in a financial scam.

In the UK, it is likely that they will tighten existing rules later this year, making banks directly accountable for reimbursement. Legislators in other countries are considering similar measures.

“In this environment of faster payments and a more sophisticated scam landscape, banks should look at proactive strategies to protect their customers from financial crime,” said Nuno Sebastiao, CEO of Feedzai. “We believe that banks which embrace a comprehensive RiskOps approach will outperform in customer satisfaction and retention. All the while minimising losses from financial crime.”