Alacriti and Socure Team to Prevent Payment ID Fraud

Payments FinTech Alacriti has teamed with Socure to prevent identity fraud in instant payments.

“Instant payments require real-time fraud prevention, which is not something many existing enterprise fraud systems are well-equipped to handle,” Mark Majeske, senior vice president of faster payments at Alacriti, said in a news release Thursday (April 13).

With this partnership, he added, financial institutions (FIs) get access to Socure’s fraud prevention solution, which is fully integrated with Cosmos, the Alacriti payments hub.

That hub, which uses the Orbipay platform, lets FIs deliver modern money movement experiences to their customer while lowering operating costs, and speeding time to market, the news release said.

Alacriti’s Orbipay AIQ is a cloud-based, machine learning-based tool designed to manage fraud and risk tied to instant payments processed through payment rails such as The Clearing House (TCH) RTP network, the FedNowSM Service and Visa Direct, as well as conventional payments such as ACH or wire transfers, the companies said.

“As more banks and credit unions leverage the RTP® network to send instant payments, having access to appropriate fraud tools becomes an important part of a real-time payments strategy,” said Keith Gray, vice president of strategic partnerships at The Clearing House.

“We are happy to see Alacriti and Socure working together to provide fraud monitoring tools to financial institutions in the real-time payments ecosystem.”

The partnership is happening at a moment when the fear of fraud is preventing consumers from using digital bank transfers, as recent PYMNTS research has shown.

“New Payment Options: Building Stronger Customer Ties With Pay By Bank Transfer,” a PYMNTS and Nuvei collaboration, found that 36% of consumers who have not used online bank transfers in the past year have security concerns. Among those who have, 34% still have qualms about using their bank account as a base for transfers especially.

“For example, 73% of consumers concerned about security issues with online bank transfers in the abstract cite the risk of fraud as an issue that concerns them, but 75% of consumers who used online bank transfers in their most recent in-person payment say the risk of fraud also concerns them,” the study said.

The research found that consumers across age groups were most concerned about using bank account transfers for recurring bill payments (42.1%), eCommerce purchases (39.4%) and a mix of both of the two (31.7%).

All the same, consumers say they are interested in the speed provided by bank transfers, as is demonstrated in findings on user interest. Nearly 42% of all consumers surveyed said they were very or extremely interested in using bank transfers as a form of payment.