ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), an international provider of real-time payments and digital payment software applications, reveals that it has teamed up with Swedbank, a leading issuing and acquiring bank in the Nordic and Baltic regions.
The company has contributed to a 55% decrease in payment card-related fraud, helping to greatly enhance customer experience (CX) while supporting steady business growth for the Swedish banking platform.
Swedbank, just like some of the other European financial institutions, had been facing a lot of pressure to comply with and adopt Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. SCA, a regulatory mandate under PSD2, aims to protect individual consumers and companies from fraudulent activities by making it quite difficult for scammers and other bad actors to conduct payments from their accounts.
Under these updated regulations, European consumers and business organizations have to verify their identity with two steps of authentication. SCA checks are mandated for all virtual payments valued at more than €30 but may be exempted if the merchant has proven they have low levels of fraud.
The bank teamed up with ACI in order to improve its fraud detection platform with the assistance of the ACI Fraud Management. Swedbank has managed to transition from a rules-based to a holistic fraud management system– which applies key insights from machine learning and shared data along with the rules – to exempt low-risk transactions from the SCA requirements.
By using ACI’s model generator functionality, Swedbank is able to create and maintain its own predictive machine learning models in minutes. The offering was improved with shared intelligence, which has allowed the bank to work with hybrid machine learning models.
Tonu Ots, Head of Card Issuing, Swedbank, stated:
“Utilizing ACI Fraud Management has allowed us to move from single transaction monitoring to customer behavior monitoring, a strategy that helps us to quickly identify low-risk transactions and exempt them from SCA’s two-factor authentication requirements. This has led to a considerable decrease in card fraud and helped to enhance the customer experience, which is crucial to business growth in light of average high checkout abandonment rates.”
Jay Floyd, Senior Principal Financial Crime Consultant, ACI Worldwide, added:
“Swedbank has demonstrated that it is possible to turn the SCA challenge into an opportunity. In addition to delivering an innovative fraud management solution that maintains compliance, manages exemptions and enhances the customer experience, the bank has created a true market differentiator for themselves and their clients by deploying the latest ACI technology.”
In March of this year, Swedbank had been formally recognized for its approach to SCA with the Model Risk Manager Award for Legacy and Ecosystem Transformation by Celent.