SEON and GBG APAC partner up to enhance online fraud prevention
By Gaia Lamperti
Fraud fighters SEON teamed up with GBG APAC, the global expert in digital identity, to strengthen online fraud prevention for banks, FinTechs and digital banks helping businesses across the Asia Pacific region prevent fraud and meet complex compliance requirements.
With SEON’s technology integrated into the GBG Intelligence Centre, the alliance will allow the use of publicly available information like email, IP, phone and social media as alternative data for fraud detection, while meeting compliance and data privacy needs.
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitisation, causing the rapid growth of digital banks worldwide with the Asia Pacific region reporting a threefold increase in their customer bases in 2020 compared to traditional banks. Mature economies like Singapore and Hong Kong have established high FinTech adoption rates, and emerging economies like Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines are gearing to achieve broader financial inclusion.
But with digitisation come fraud risks too. As Financial Crime 4.0 continues to grow, SEON will enable GBG to increase its effectiveness in combatting modern-day fraud by matching information given during account application and loan origination with publicly available information. SEON’s technology can create a much clearer picture of a company’s clients, allowing them not just to reject fraudsters but accept real customers who might have previously been excluded.
For example, the service could identify from an email address whether a new customer is active on social media, determining if they are a real person as opposed to an artificial persona created for the purposes of fraud. Combining more than 35 social signals with digital data points, SEON’s results have been consistently strong across a wide range of industries and, in some cases, have reduced fraudulent activity by 95% and chargebacks by 91%.
“The ability to identify fraudulent behavioural patterns also means businesses can discover hidden revenue opportunities. SEON’s AI adapts to any business model, learning how it operates to create fully transparent and visible rules,” Jimmy Fong, Chief Commercial Officer at SEON, commented. “This creates a scalable fraud prevention solution for all online business types, whether as a payment service provider, payment gateway, neobank, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), gaming, anti-money laundering and more. The combination of GBG and SEON is a modernised solution for a fast-moving digital age, set to create greater agility to mitigate growing risks of fraud brought on by the pandemic, while smoothening and automating financial crime management processes without compromising user experience.”
As fraud costs increasingly outweigh fraud management spend, this partnership helps risk management teams to increase efficiency by reducing time spent on manual tasks as well as the ability to automate fraud detection and prevention with a high degree of accuracy while remote working is in progress.
FIs and merchants utilising the GBG Intelligence Centre will benefit from enriched data intelligence to augment fraud detection and prevention accuracy by reducing manual work for FIs, false positive and false negative rates. Complementing GBG’s AI-driven approach to detect fraud, SEON uses open data and whitebox machine learning, giving businesses complete visibility and total control of how the AI decisions are made. Its customers in the APAC region include Grab, Danabijak, ATM Online, HomeCredit, 10Bet, and Robocash.
Dev Dhiman, Managing Director of GBG, APAC, said: “To effectively address the rise in digital financial crime simply means that fraud detection and prevention measures need to be constantly modernised. This partnership with SEON continues to expand GBG’s datasets to better combat against identity crime, in particular synthetic ID, impersonation, identity theft, account takeover, money muling, and SIM swap fraud typologies.”
This partnership forms part of GBG’s commitment to protect and provide FIs with end-to-end digital fraud and compliance solutions. The GBG Intelligence Centre, with SEON incorporated, will be available to FIs across APAC, including Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand.
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