Customer-owned banking institution Greater Bank has implemented fraud detection and anti-money laundering (AML) technology from SAS, which it says will strengthen and simply its security capabilities and IT operations.
In what the Newcastle-based bank calls a “new era” of fraud detection and anti-money laundering (AML) capacity, the platform will also make it more competitive and improve the customer experience.
Across the last three years, the bank has been rolling out a digital cloud-first transformation, culminating in a completely digital bank set for launch in November 2022.
When that goes live, Greater Bank will begin migrating its 270,000 customers across to the new platform before gradually decommissioning its legacy systems.
Greater Bank group general counsel and company secretary Greg Nyman told iTnews the bank “is moving into a new era almost in how we manage fraud because of this technology uplift”.
“Once we get through migration, which is obviously our focus, it's all looking at ways to enhance what we're doing in terms of utilising all the functionality that the system delivers to us,” he said.
Nyman said the bank will look to increase its level of automation “and then ultimately adding an AI element into that as well”.
“We're really excited about that and what this means to us, not just now but as we move forward,” he said.
“It's going to be crucial for us to have this capability... in the changing environment that we have to face, because that environment is not getting easier for us.”
Nyman said part of its transformation journey required the bank to reshape it legacy fraud and AML solutions “which were four or five disparate systems that weren't properly integrated, that were not very flexible and weren't very user friendly.”
The SAS solution “came out on top by quite some way” after evaluating market options given the strategic alignment to a cloud-first technology approach.
The bank opted for SAS’ hosted managed service solutions delivered on Microsoft Azure which “adds up to just making life simpler and easy for us”.
Nyman also said the solution is “in private beta testing at the moment and we'll move into full production aligned with our migration date later in the year”.
Nyman has also noted a seeing a move away from call system-based fraud, such as counterfeit cards to customer-based scams.
“Now what we're facing into is very sophisticated scams, where the fraudsters are actually contacting the customer and convincing them to actually transact in a particular way," he said.
“Having a fraud solution that is able to identify changes in transaction patterns and… just to pick up the unusual transaction is key for us going forward.
“The reality is that that as we move, the fraudsters move and learn and we need to be really proactive in how we address fraud both in terms of our intelligence and also being able to make changes to our rules.”
Nyman said that’s one of the benefits the SAS platform delivers to Greater Bank.
“We potentially could receive some intelligence about a new scam in the morning and actually have new rules in place by that afternoon once we're up and running," he said.
“Having the ability to respond that quickly through the SAS platform and everything that it delivers to us is very much part of the equation- that responsiveness.”
