Sri Lanka’s NSB To Utilize ACI For Fraud Detection

cybersecurity

Digital payment software and solutions firm ACI Worldwide will be working with Sri Lanka’s National Savings Bank to implement a new solution for mitigating fraud, a press release states.

The bank will implement ACI’s Payments Risk Management Solution, which will let it access comprehensive services to look at card-based transactions, internet and mobile banking, mobile wallets and real-time payments to sniff out fraud.

This comes as Sri Lanka’s banking industry is evolving at a quick pace, with surging electronic payments and over 25 million credit and debit cards in use at the end of 2019, the press release says. There was over 30 percent year-over-year growth of debit card transactions, in both volume and value.

Damitha Rathnayake, acting GM/CEO with the bank, said the growing preference for electronic payments in the country also came with a double-edged sword, in that the chance of fraud or scams also increased.

She said the partnership with ACI would help with that.

“As digital payments increasingly become the country’s preferred transaction method, security and fraud mitigation are growing challenges for financial institutions that are looking to provide seamless customer experiences. This can only be achieved with a real-time, customer-centric approach to fraud prevention,” she said, according to the release. “ACI’s reliability and scalability in payment solutions are unparalleled, and we are confident that the added real-time fraud detection alongside our existing ACI retail payments infrastructure will strengthen our fraud monitoring capabilities, enabling us to deliver an even greater customer experience.”

Kaushik Roy, vice president and country leader for ACI in in South Asia, agreed, saying the shift to digital, despite its many good benefits, “could expose vulnerabilities to fraud and put customers at increased risk, as fraudsters evolve to exploit the weakest link — whether that’s technology or human.”

Jack Bloch, ACI senior vice president of software engineering, said there’s likely no magic bullet to put a stop to all fraud, but that machine learning could likely help engineer ways to track it and put a stop to it more than what used to happen. That will still come with challenges, though, as the fraudsters are adapting to machine learning as well.