CO-OP Financial Enlists AI In Fraud Fight

CO-OP Financial Services announced it will now bring artificial intelligence (AI) to the table when it comes to combatting fraud.

The company said it will rollout a machine learning-based risk management tool for its client credit unions this year.

“A key pain point for credit unions in 2017 is that fraud mitigation tools have not kept pace with the relentless advance of fraud,” Todd Clark, president/CEO of CO-OP, said in statement.

“CO-OP Financial Services has an equally relentless commitment to credit union and cardholder security. We are investing $20 million this year on new innovations to ensure credit unions have access to the very best technology in the payments industry. Implementing machine learning capabilities is a key initiative in delivery on that promise,” Clark continued.

CO-OP is partnering with data science company Feedzai, which specializes in fraud prevention by using machine learning to help develop solutions that will address the growing financial fraud threat facing credit unions.

The solutions created via the partnership will be available exclusively to CO-OP’s credit union client base and will run on an agile machine learning platform that will work in real time.

“Artificial intelligence has previously been thought of as technology only available to governmental organizations or the largest of corporations,” Nuno Sebastiao, CEO of Feedzai, said. “Feedzai is pioneering ‘attainable AI’ — AI that will really work, right now for any sized company. There is perfect synergy between ourselves and CO-OP, and we are very excited to be working with them to bring machine learning to the aid of credit unions.”

According to CO-OP, the platform will leverage an improved transaction scoring model to predict debit and credit card fraud more accurately. This, it explained, will help to reduce fraud losses for credit unions while also preventing an increase in false declines.