CBA caps fraud to 2003 levels
The Commonwealth Bank has capped its fraud exposure to 2003 levels, thanks to real-time data analytics.Two security analysis platforms - the financial crimes system and a real-time transaction monitoring system that are linked directly to the bank's core banking platform - remain front and centre of CBA's war on crime, according to Matt Keaney, general manager of financial crime services.Speaking at the SAS Forum on data analytics in Sydney yesterday, Keaney said that, besides capping the cost of fraud to the bank, the costs associated with delivering this level of protection had remained static over the last seven years, although some of the products and services monitored had grown by 130 to 300 per cent over this period.The real-time transaction monitoring system, which was deployed in 2010 after debit losses became "unnacceptable" to the bank, was now monitoring nine million transactions a day, 400 transactions per second, 12 million account profiles and 22 million customer relationships, he said.Keaney said this system was used to monitor debit fraud and online banking. With such systems, resilience was critical: "This stuff needs to chug along 24x7 because the crims don't stop," he said.The financial crimes platform, which is used to monitor cheque and originating fraud, and also AML/CTF compliance, sources data from 39 separate sources, on 11 million customers, and monitors eight million transactions per business night. In order to achieve compliance, it is also required to analyse 465 million transactions in a 24-hour period.At present, the bank focuses on analysing its own data, although it is assessing the merits of including additional data for analysis, potentially from social media.