Next-Generation Software Outsmarts Fraudsters
An innovative Concord company has developed software that helps banks fight fraud.
Concord-based Memento, Inc., has developed an innovative approach to tackling bank and credit card fraud – a growing problem that accounts for as much as $19 billion in annual losses for the financial services industry. Memento is harnessing the power and flexibility of collaborative Web-based software to help financial institutions protect their assets and their customers.
Traditionally, banks have detected fraud by creating special databases containing a relatively narrow set of financial transaction information. Simple rules are set to trigger an alarm if, for example, a customer withdraws money from an ATM hundreds of miles from home. Such systems, however, often send out false alarms that waste the valuable time of bank analysts and investigators. And the databases are costly to upgrade when fraudsters find creative ways to beat the system.
Memento, which counts five of the nation’s top 15 banks among its customers, has developed a more accurate and flexible system. Recognizing that attacks on a bank’s security systems often come in new and unexpected ways, Memento’s software indexes all of a bank’s information databases – including both money-related transactions and non-transactional data such as phone numbers and address changes – and then uses a proprietary search engine to scan the data for shifts in activity or behavior that might be noteworthy. The information is fed into Memento’s case management application built on top of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, an enterprise information portal. Bank analysts monitor the warning signs and use the software to pursue further investigations as warranted. Bank executives say an investigation that previously would have taken all day can be completed in minutes with Memento’s software.
The software also allows banks to target new forms of fraud that otherwise might escape detection. Increasingly, for example, sophisticated crime rings are using a combination of “channels” — including identity theft, counterfeit checks and fraudulent online banking transactions — to steal money unnoticed from a customer’s account over several months. Since Memento’s software monitors all of these channels, and brings the information together into one application, analysts are more likely to notice the fraud before it causes customer losses.
Memento is one of more than 6,500 information technology companies in Massachusetts whose products are based on Microsoft’s technology platform. This partner ecosystem employs more than 120,000 people in the state and generates $4 billion annually in revenues for local companies, according to an independent study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by global IT research firm IDC.
Innovation in software development is at the center of solving many of today’s challenges, and Massachusetts companies continue to be at the forefront of these breakthroughs. That’s why Microsoft continues to make significant, long-term investments in developing next-generation software and services, while collaborating with companies like Memento that are developing breakthrough solutions to pressing problems — both old and new.
