In one of the closing sessions of EBAday 2024 in Lisbon, panellists Marc Corbalan, VP of RTP analytics at Visa; Erwin Kulk, head of service development and management at EBA Clearing; Simone Löfgen, global head of payment platforms and managing director at Commerzbank; and Kannan Rasappan, founder and CEO of Banfico, explored innovations in cybersecurity in a panel titled ‘New approaches to fraud management’.
Kulk stated that joining forces and working together with other industry players is a way that the industry can outsmart and combat fraudsters.
Lofgen agreed: “It is absolutely crucial that we are connected, and that we've defined common ways of combating this industry challenge, so there shouldn't be any competition on fraud because it's a joint attack that we're all facing.
She expounded that there need to be common ways to be combatting this challenge, and fraudsters are well-connected while banks are bound by strict regulations, and so there should be less competition and more collaboration as the industry shares information and technology.
Rasappan pointed out: “The one thing [banks] haven't tried is working together. We have thrown money at the assets, technology, all of these advancements within the bank, but we couldn't solve this problem.”
He went on to say that to solve the issue, banks not only need to engage in collaboration, but educate customers to ensure they are fulfilling their responsibility of protecting their users.
Kulk noted that instant payment growth is growing in revenue, but instant payments fraud is six times higher than regular credit transfers, and to solve this issue they need to consider other avenues: “To get to the essence of fighting fraud, we need to guarantee a successful ramp up, and I think Verification of Payee will be could be one of the tools that could help with it.”
He added that Verification of Payee could help specifically in addressing risk, but there needs to be awareness from the bank on where they should create friction and where they should avoid it. Lofgen added that fraud detection is more than
Verification of Payee, as it understands patterns and eliminates false positives, and models are still in the process of being refined to do more.
The speakers examined approaching fraud management with AI to detect cyberthreats, and utilising social media as a way to combat fraudsters. Kulk posited that social media platforms also need to take responsibility and action in combatting fraud that occurs on their platforms, or often starts off on them.
Corbalan observed that there is a mix of hype and real involvement around AI, but he sees real potential in the power of GenAI to change the field:
“GenAI is transformational to the comparable to the state change that will happen in AI when cloud computing became available with the opportunity of AI. That said, there are areas where GenAI is already outperforming traditional machine learning models and vice versa. We all know that GenAI is stronger is generally with large data sets and automation of tasks. On the flip side, traditional machine learning is still stronger today in terms of number of new models and scoring.”
Moving on to the topic of sharing data and the security concerns around that, Kulk emphasised the solutions that centralised data could offer:
“It's technically not possible for everybody to share data with everybody. It's legally not possible. But if you have centralised data, you create views on where everybody can detect patterns and anomalies. Then the company can add value and this is a way to call and collaborate within the legal setup.”
The panellists then return to one of the overarching themes of EBAday discussed earlier, collaboration. They highlighted how collaboration with different industries can make financial organisations more agile in their fraud approaches. They agreed that collaboration and leveraging the technology of the digital age must be the path forward in the field.