Australian banks team up with BioCatch to mitigate fraud and scams

To further combat fraudulent activities across Australia’s financial sector, major banks across the region chose BioCatch, an Israel-based digital fraud detection startup, to introduce BioCatch Trust Australia, a pilot of inter-bank, behaviour and device-based, fraud and scams intelligence-sharing network. The service is set to be leveraged to analyse whether the customers of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, ANZ Group Holdings, Westpac, and Suncorp Bank are legitimate or fraudulent.

The announcement follows BioCatch’s collaboration with Google Cloud from March 2024, when the two companies joined forces to extend fraud prevention solutions to additional markets, especially emerging ones. Initially focusing on Southeast Asia, the alliance intended to address the scaling threat of financial cybercrime in the region by utilising BioCatch’s advanced fraud detection, scam prevention, and AML solutions.

Fighting fraud in Australia’s banking payments

With the BioCatch Trust solution, banks are set to be able to assess the possible risk linked with accounts to which customers direct their domestic online payments within the BioCatch network. If the network recognises any risk, the company can deliver real-time intelligence to the sending financial institutions, allowing transaction review before the funds leave the sender’s account.  Also, before a payment is processed, BioCatch Trust merges behavioural intelligence with digital session, payment, account, device, and non-monetary event intelligence to analyse the potential risks of receiving accounts on the network. Through this, banks can prevent scams where the fraudster manipulates the victim outside of a digital banking session, including through an email, text message, or social media post. This is achieved while leveraging proven pseudonymisation technology to safeguard the identities of those customers within the BioCatch Trust network.

Furthermore, the capabilities of the network are optimised with each new financial institution that joins it. With more banks contributing to account intelligence, the system can become more efficient, providing deeper insights and broadening its coverage. In addition, collective intelligence supports the mitigation of existing, unknown, and emerging threats, resulting in augmented fraud detection across the Australian banking ecosystem. At the same time, BioCatch Trust comes as an addition to existing networks that share information after a scam has been conducted, supporting the sending bank in making real-time risk assessments of receiving accounts before the sender transfers its funds.