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New IBM configurations designed for flexibility, sustainability and security within the data center We are excited to collaborate with IBM as the company today unveils

In a fiercely competitive environment, banks have been striving to generate more revenues while trying to increase customer stickiness and curtail customer attrition. The scenario has compelled the need for a holistic approach for creating strong customer-centricity – the key aim of great Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM). Read the prequel of the 2-part blog on how banks can enhance their CLM by first de-risking the onboarding process.

Every year, banks shut down tens of thousands of accounts for suspected fraudulent practices. A substantial chunk of these accounts is suspected to be mule accounts and conventional anti-mule fraud systems have had little impact to stop the problem. Whether as complicit players or as victims, money mules are now also laundering funds for organized COVID motivated financial crimes. With the virus continuing to provide opportunities for fraud and money laundering, banks must boost their monitoring and investigation capabilities to counter this growing threat.

Even as regulators step up their scrutiny of bank compliance, fraud and money laundering schemes are getting more and more sophisticated. Banks therefore have no choice but to elevate their crime-detection and crime-fighting capabilities. Defence mechanisms will increasingly include more powerful analytical models, AI and the aid of financial crime regtech specialists.

Where there’s money, there’s crime. Trust fraudsters to leverage new technology in their commitment to gain access to accounts, or to set up accounts or steal money. It is just a matter of time before deepfake becomes another new normal for digital rogues to defraud banks.

We are excited to share that IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 will be available globally on September 14, 2022, and Clari5 clients will have the opportunity to reduce energy consumption while reaching sustainability targets. IBM and its partners are helping clients, including those in regulated industries such as financial services, build a modern environment that is designed to improve business agility and reduce overall costs. ISVs can leverage the next generation of IBM LinuxONE’s highly secured and sustainable platform to deploy software across environments.

The pandemic has been having a mammoth socio-economic impact on almost every conceivable aspect and the banking sector too has not been immune. The crisis has put certain critical aspects of the banking universe in the spotlight, including that of customer experience – a vital factor during extreme times. Imperative therefore to re-visit how customers’ digital experiences can be made frictionless during an exceptionally difficult phase.

Imagine an intelligent system that studies customers’ behavioral patterns to detect fraud, is also creating precise personas for the bank’s marketing teams to target campaigns to. The same real-time, context-aware logic/approach used to combat cross-channel fraud can also help enable intelligent, hyper-precise targeted and contextual customer engagements.

Challenger Banks have undoubtedly been a great idea as they have redefined banking with a brand-new model. But they cannot side-step the foundational principle, i.e. banking is a business of trust – something that can be impacted with just one unexpected incident. While their innovative customer-centric strategies make Challenger Banks agile and responsive, the rush to make customer onboarding fast and effortless also makes them more vulnerable to the growing threat of financial crimes.

A recent survey by the National Center for Public Opinion Surveys under the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue revealed that 62% of Saudis are exposed to attempts of financial fraud. About 28% of those who were exposed to financial fraud attempts said that there was a relationship between the financial fraud attempt they had been exposed to and a previous activity they had done.