Switzerland is often considered to be a bastion of financial security when it comes to bank and vaults. However, cards need to be protected in the European nation as well. UBS and FICO think they have cracked the solution with a secure payment innovation.

Switzerland has two cards per inhabitant, according to GlobalData. With an 8.6 million strong population, that a decent number of products to keep secure.

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UBS holds the most credit cards in circulation in Switzerland with 1.58 million in circulation and a transaction value of CHF11.3bn over 2018. Credit Suisse has the same amount of credit cards in Switzerland, but with a transaction value of only CHF10.6bn.

One thing reducing the amount of fraud write-offs per compromised card is the UBS Card Centre. This processes roughly 25% of all credit cards in Switzerland. Furthermore, it utilises the FICO Falcon Platform, a solution that currently protects approximately 2.6 billion payment cards worldwide. This platform helped it win Security Innovation of the Year at the Retail Banker International Global Awards 2019.

In 2018, the card processor successfully stopped 84% more fraudulent transactions than in 2015. This was attributed to leveraging the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities of the FICO Falcon Platform. In addition, the FICO Fraud Predictor aided the process with adaptive analytics.

Fraud experts at UBS used the free-form rule writing within FICO’s technology to create complex rules. These deployed both the AI-enabled Falcon Fraud Score and innovative adaptive analytics to fine-tune the neural network models in Falcon.

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Furthermore, these custom rules, added with the analytics, were the best way to improve false-positive and fraud detection rates.

A new approach was also attached. For the first time, the Card Centre directly declined transactions that appeared to be fraudulent rather than creating an alert to be reviewed with the customer.

As a result, UBS was able to manage far more fraud cases while also saving on manpower and costs. Only if there is a further fraud activity will a customer be contacted after an alert.

Thanks to this, the UBS Card Centre managed a 42% increase in fraud cases without bringing in more resources. Losses were kept low, as were false positives, and customer satisfaction remained high.