- 80% of fraud specialists using AI-based platforms believe the technology helps reduce payments fraud.
- 63.6% of financial institutions that use AI believe it is capable of preventing fraud before it happens, making it the most commonly cited tool for this purpose.
- Fraud specialists unanimously agree that AI-based fraud prevention is very effective at reducing chargebacks.
- The majority of fraud specialists (80%) have seen AI-based platforms reduce false positives, payments fraud, and prevent fraud attempts.
AI is proving to be very effective in battling fraud based on results achieved by financial institutions as reported by senior executives in a recent survey, AI Innovation Playbook published by PYMNTS in collaboration with Brighterion. The study is based on interviews with 200 financial executives from commercial banks, community banks, and credit unions across the United States. For additional details on the methodology, please see page 25 of the study. One of the more noteworthy findings is that financial institutions with over $100B in assets are the most likely to have adopted AI, as the study has found 72.7% of firms in this asset category are currently using AI for payment fraud detection.
Taken together, the findings from the survey reflect how AI thwarts payments fraud and deserves to be a high priority in any digital business today. Companies, including Kount and others, are making strides in providing AI-based platforms, further reducing the risk of the most advanced, complex forms of payments fraud.
Why AI Is Perfect For Fighting Payments Fraud
Of the advanced technologies available for reducing false positives, reducing and preventing fraud attempts, and reducing manual reviews of potential payment fraud events, AI is ideally suited to provide the scale and speed needed to take on these challenges. More specifically, AI’s ability to interpret trend-based insights from supervised machine learning, coupled with entirely new knowledge gained from unsupervised machine learning algorithms are reducing the incidence of payments fraud. By combining both machine learning approaches, AI can discern if a given transaction or series of financial activities are fraudulent or not, alerting fraud analysts immediately if they are and taking action through predefined workflows. The following are the main reasons why AI is perfect for fighting payments fraud:
- Payments fraud-based attacks are growing in complexity and often have a completely different digital footprint or pattern, sequence, and structure, which make them undetectable using rules-based logic and predictive models alone. For years e-commerce sites, financial institutions, retailers, and every other type of online business relied on rules-based payment fraud prevention systems. In the earlier years of e-commerce, rules and simple predictive models could identify most types of fraud. Not so today, as payment fraud schemes have become more nuanced and sophisticated, which is why AI is needed to confront these challenges.
- AI brings scale and speed to the fight against payments fraud, providing digital businesses with an immediate advantage in battling the many risks and forms of fraud. What’s fascinating about the AI companies offering payments fraud solutions is how they’re trying to out-innovate each other when it comes to real-time analysis of transaction data. Real-time transactions require real-time security. Fraud solutions providers are doubling down on this area of R&D today, delivering impressive results. The fastest I’ve seen is a 250-millisecond response rate for calculating risk scores using AI on the Kount platform, basing queries on a decades-worth of data in their universal data network. By combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, Kount is delivering fraud scores that are twice as predictive as previous methods and faster than competitors.
- AI’s many predictive analytics and machine learning techniques are ideal for finding anomalies in large-scale data sets in seconds. The more data a machine learning model has to train on, the more accurate its predictive value. The greater the breadth and depth of data, a given machine learning algorithm learns from means more than how advanced or complex a given algorithm is. That’s especially true when it comes to payments fraud detection where machine learning algorithms learn what legitimate versus fraudulent transactions look like from a contextual intelligence perspective. By analyzing historical account data from a universal data network, supervised machine learning algorithms can gain a greater level of accuracy and predictability. Kount’s universal data network is among the largest, including billions of transactions over 12 years, 6,500 customers, 180+ countries and territories, and multiple payment networks. The data network includes different transaction complexities, verticals, and geographies, so machine learning models can be properly trained to predict risk accurately. That analytical richness includes data on physical real-world and digital identities creating an integrated picture of customer behavior.
Bottom Line: Payments fraud is insidious, difficult to stop, and can inflict financial harm on any business in minutes. Battling payment fraud needs to start with a pre-emptive strategy to thwart fraud attempts by training machine learning models to quickly spot and act on threats then building out the strategy across every selling and service channel a digital business relies on.