As part of the payments intelligence team at ACI Worldwide, I am responsible for serving anything related to payments operations and the consumer experience, including improving and optimising acceptance rates and reducing friction.
To elaborate on the current state of the fraud and payments landscape, the speed of payments and the types of payments by geographical sector continue to evolve exponentially. The factors driving that change are cost, consumer ease and preference, and safety and security. As seen by acquiring banks, consumers are paying with different payment methods or alternative payment methods. Mobile adoption is growing, while easy and frictionless payments are becoming widely accepted and growing rapidly.
Other alternative payment methods such as QR code payments, where consumers pay between themselves using real-time payments, have also increased in adoption rates. Thus, there are many different factors affecting the current state of payments, primarily speed, cost, and ease of use.
One of the main challenges that organisations face when it comes to payments and fraud prevention is communication between internal departments and coming together collectively to collaborate to ensure that fraud prevention is seen and understood across all channels. Good communication also implies monitoring in a way that enables merchants or banks to detect and prevent fraud across channels, while also making it easier for the consumer to purchase items across channels or return items across those channels and benefit from an enhanced, end-to-end experience.
The major challenges that banks, merchants, and billers across the industry face are borderless segment industry (all industries, regardless of their object of activity or region) phishing (sending emails or other types of messages, allegedly from reputed companies, to obtain personal information such as credit card numbers or passwords), pharming (directing internet users to bogus websites that mimic the appearance of legitimate ones to obtain personal sensitive data such as passwords or credit card details), and whaling (targeting an important person from a company, usually a C-level executive). I am still surprised at how these types of fraud occur across all channels and industries, in ways that no one would think of.
One of the most successful ways for corporations to prevent and detect fraud is signals that are readable and digestible by humans. AI models have always produced, and will continue producing, a score – but if you told me this transaction or this payment has a score of 899, I wouldn’t be able to digest or make a decision accurately, solely based on what that 899 score means. However, if you indicated to me that this payment has a score of 899 and a signal of account takeover (ATO) or a signal of synthetic identity, my decision process and the next steps taken, either from an application or through a human being, would be more actionable and insightful.
Enabling organisations to conduct business safely, securely, and optimally involves balancing all these attributes and enforcing them appropriately. ACI Worldwide has proven its expertise in protecting the entire payments ecosystem for a very long time and has remained relevant and up to date with the help of AI.
We understand payments across all segments with secure, real-time technology. We learn and advance our tools and technologies in real time. Success means making a precise decision delivered by signals that are readable and digestible by humans. As much as you could invest in a technology, if you’re only getting a score or an innocuous decision of a decline that can be circumvented by a human being who doesn’t understand those signals, that human being can unintentionally authorise a fraudulent payment or allow a fraudulent money transfer in real time.
At ACI Worldwide, we deliver signal-based payments intelligence with end-to-end insights that detect ATO, synthetic identity, or first-party fraud. These are signals that are digestible to a human being to ensure that we prevent and detect fraud and deliver a safe global payments ecosystem alongside hyper-personalised expertise for our customers.
Erika is a certified fraud and analytics professional with over 20 years of experience in payment acceptance optimisation, global fraud prevention, digital identity verification and authentication, statistical data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence enterprise real-time financial decision technology solutions. She leads a global team of fraud professionals across six different countries overseeing customer analysis and implementing state-of-the-art intelligent solutions to reduce operational costs and generate incremental revenue. Erika’s contributions have been recognised with the ‘Forty under 40’ and Women in Payments Educator in 2019.
ACI Worldwide, an original innovator in global payments technology, delivers transformative software solutions that power intelligent payments orchestration in real time so banks, billers, and merchants can drive growth, while continuously modernising their payment infrastructures, simply and securely. With nearly 50 years of trusted payments expertise, ACI Worldwide combines its global footprint with a local presence to offer enhanced payment experiences to stay ahead of constantly changing payment challenges and opportunities.
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