It has announced the adoption of an intelligent platform that utilizes analytics, AI and Authentication-as-a-Service to boost consumers’ confidence in e-commerce.

The Philippines is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in South-east Asia, with transactions projected to grow to US$15bn in 2025. However, fraud attack vectors have also grown in sophistication, with rising fraud control costs amounting to 2.03% of overall annual revenues.

To address this problem, one of the country’s banks, Equicom Savings Bank (EqB) is expected to address online fraud, create a safer and seamless way for consumers to transact in the digital economy by adopting an intelligent payment authentication solution.

The platform is modelled on EMVCo 3.2 guidelines and exploits the rich data streams exchanged between merchants and issuers to continually learn customers’ transactional patterns and assess risk.  Metrics such as location, merchant, transaction, and device-related attributes are also considered.

Noted the bank’s Vice President and Head, Consumer & Small Business Lending Division, RousselE. Larger: “Fraud is an ever-evolving problem, so we need to ensure that our prevention technology is evolving even better to maximize protection… mitigate fraud threats and create low-friction trusted experiences that customers expect.”

Benchmarked to process 8,000 transactions per second, the adopted technology helps to systemically isolate higher-risk transactions while reducing the need to interrupt consumers’ purchase processes. For the higher-risk transactions, the platform dynamically provides additional verification checks such as biometric-based identification or a one-time passcode.

Additional services such as Authentication as-a-Service will also help the bank in implementation, integration, certification, testing, and technical operations, resulting in faster processing time and higher sales conversion. This alleviates costs as well as regulatory compliance burdens.

According to Krishnan Srinivasan, COO, FSS PayTech, the firm providing the platform, the payments market is fiercely competitive, so it is important for financial institutions to layer intelligent counter-fraud measures to lower fraud costs “to align with core operational and risk strategies… and balance fraud detection without compromising the customer experience.”