Fiserv Beefs Up ACH Fraud-Screening Tool with Richer Data

Fiserv, Inc. has beefed up the predictive powers of its core ACH fraud-screening tool with additional data sources, enhancing banks' abilities to block suspicious electronic transactions in real time.

Fiserv's Payment Fraud Manager tool now leverages data gathered from hundreds of U.S. financial institutions of all sizes to generate risk scores for prospective transactions, using models that are more effective in detecting fraud than relying solely on data from an individual financial institution, Fiserv said in a Sept. 19 press release.

The tool, introduced last year to detect fraudulent transactions across all major electronic settlement channels including ACH, Swift, SEPA and Fedwire, now can also update behavioral profiles 30% faster than the original version, the company said.

Payment Fraud Manager, part of Fiserv's Financial Crime Risk Management platform, analyzes a bank's prospective transactions in real time, scoring and flagging suspicious transactions for further review by bank personnel. The tool enables banks to detect more than 90% of ACH fraud by reviewing only 2% of all transactions and covers high-value and low-value payments of any volume, according to the release.

"People expect their money to move fast, and financial institutions must be able to prevent fraud at the same speed to protect their customers and assets," said Tim Grace, Fiserv's senior vice president and general manager of financial and risk management solutions.