Aspect Verify Has Authenticated Over 250 Million UK Banking Transactions

Aspect Verify, a cloud-based trust platform for retail banking from Aspect Software, has now authenticated 250 million UK transactions.

The fraud detection software offers heightened support for multi-factor identity authentication for online and telephone payments, while maintaining a seamless and secure user experience.

The platform validates on average over 6.5 million transactions a month, the equivalent to £2 billion worth of transactions in this time, and since its launch in 2012, has prevented several major banks losing over £10 million in fraud-related costs per year, on average.

Keiron Dalton, Global Program Senior Director, Aspect Verify, commented: “Banks are not only legally and ethically required to protect their customers from fraud, but the confidence of allowing transactions is also of great value.

“The industry continues to move from a reactive one, including lots of anti- and post-fraud activity, to a much more proactive and collaborative approach.”

Aspect Verify enhances customer experience by building brand trust. It is a collection of automated engagement solutions for proactive monitoring, identification, prevention, and notification of fraudulent transactions, including SIM Swap, mobile location and diverted calls.

Notification options target both the organisation and the customer, and include system-level alerts as well as phone calls (landline or mobile), SMS, and email. Aspect Verify enables the bank to manage the ongoing communication with the customer

Keiron said: “Aspect Verify is also the start of the banking industry leveraging the average mobile phone as a user’s digital ID, and in fact, in doing so we have successfully secured over 20 high-risk cases for major banks in the last 12 months.

“Thanks to ubiquity, usage and experience, the mobile is quickly becoming the best form of ID, with access to rich data and insights that will enable organisations such as banks and payment processors to accurately verify the user.

“Behavioural, operator and transactional insights can be collected and verified legitimately with no disruption to the user experience. Users don’t need to exert any extra effort to prove who they are just because fraud has become more sophisticated.

“Aspect Verify uses such an approach that flags suspicious activity for certain sophisticated fraud before it can have an impact on the customer’s account. Genuine customers are less likely to be impacted by false positives, and the user experience is not impacted by intrusive or disruptive verification techniques.”

Keiron continued: “The software works in harmony with chief factors such as passwords, PINs, and different kinds of biomechanical verifications such as fingerprint and Touch ID on mobiles. It doesn’t require anything to be memorised, anything to be installed or for the user to have a hard token on their person, so isn’t invasive to the customer.

“Imperceptible checks like these make use of what is already publicly available – i.e. mobile data – to offer extra protection to both the customer and the bank.”

Aspect Verify is also helping many organisations to meet the requirements set out in the EU’s Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), which will become law in all Member States by 13th January 2018, and will remain part of local law after the UK leaves the EU in 2019.

PSD2 rules state that the two or more methods of authentication must be independent so they cannot be compromised by each other.