FICO announced that Santander has received a 2012 Banking Technology Award for Best Security Initiative for its SIM swapping solution, developed with Adeptra and rolled out in Santander’s UK operations. FICO acquired Adeptra in August. The award was given in December by Banking Technology magazine.
Banks are seeing an increase in “SIM swapping”, a financial crime where criminals take over a customer’s mobile phone number by having it moved to a SIM (subscriber identification module) card in their possession in order to acquire security messages and one-time passwords sent to the consumer by the bank. The criminals are then able to change details, add beneficiaries and transfer money out of the account, using personal information that may have been acquired through phishing attempts. Following a pilot with a number of vendors, Santander chose to work with Adeptra and its partner ValidSoft to develop, test and implement the world’s first real-time detection and prevention application to tackle the growing problem in the banking industry.
“The security of a bank is the top priority when customers choose who to bank with,” said Karen Tyler, head of Fraud Operations at Santander UK. “Customers want a secure account, but they do not want to be inconvenienced. The solution we developed with Adeptra is invisible to the customer, but offers better protection, improving the customer experience.”
“Once again, Santander leads the market by engaging and delivering the most sophisticated anti-fraud solutions in the industry,” said Tony McGivern, FICO’s chief information officer and former CEO of Adeptra. “The bank used advances in technology provided by Adeptra to secure the online and mobile channels, and reduce fraud losses.”
Over their 13-year history, the Banking Technology Awards have become established as the premier event recognising excellence in the use of IT in financial services. Each year the event has grown as an ever-wider pool of entrants vie for the recognition that the awards confer on their efforts – from small regional banks in central Europe and Africa to industry behemoths with multi-million budgets and global projects.
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