Practical Fraud Prevention

Chapter 11. Banking Fraud Prevention: Wider Context

You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things…

The Beatles¹

This chapter sets the scene for a focus on banking, laying the foundation for the chapters ahead and highlighting some features, such as social engineering and deepfakes, which are relevant contexts for all the banking chapters rather than being especially relevant to any particular chapter.

Differences Between Banking and Ecommerce

There are two main differences between the experience of fraud prevention at a bank or other financial institution and the experience of fraud prevention at an ecommerce company or online marketplace. We want to highlight these distinctions here as important context for the remainder of the book.

The first difference is that, compared to ecommerce businesses, banks are relatively data poor when it comes to individual transactions or in-session data. An ecommerce fraud team, analyzing a transaction to decide whether to approve or decline it, can look at the details of the product being purchased, the journey the customer took on the website, the journeys other customers took on previous visits to the site, and a wealth of metadata relating to the device, IP, and so on. Banks have none of that. They have, more or less, the information the customer enters at checkout, together with what they see when the customer is in session at their bank. It’s not nothing, but it’s thin indeed compared to what ecommerce fraud fighters see. ...