Stopping Fraud, in the Blink of an Eye

New technology promises to help keep criminals from stealing your personal data even as you swipe your credit card at the store.

This new anti-fraud arsenal comes from predictive analytics specialist FICO, (yes, that FICO), who say it works in real time, using Big Data, and performing 15,000 calculations in 40-60 milliseconds during credit card transactions.

FICO said that its Fraud Manager makes these fast, real-time fraud calculations using data associated with such things as transaction amount, merchant profile, transaction location, point-of-sale device, time of day, and credit card account history.

In other words, it crunches a ton of information collected on you and the merchant, and takes into account a bunch of other factors – all to determine whether anything seems strange about the transaction being made. By the time your card reaches the end of its swipe, the FICO technology has made a determination.

Of course, this process can result in inconvenience for you, if a transaction you wish to make is blocked by the actions of well-meaning anti-fraud software. In a statement, FICO’s chief analytics officer, Dr. Andrew Jennings, said that this new technology strikes a good balance between strong anti-fraud protection and consumer convenience by making use of more data, and fast new technology.

“By combining the power of new analytic technologies and the accumulated knowledge gleaned from trillions of previous payment transactions, it is now possible to fight fraud with surgical precision at incredible speeds, so the consumer payment experience is not disrupted,” Jennings said.

That’s a strong statement, indeed. Only time will tell if FICO Fraud Manager lives up to the hype, but with last year’s data breaches still fresh on peoples’ minds, it’s good to know that there are some new tools being brought into the fight against data crooks.