Identity fraud defence strategy for a leading CEE retail bank
A board-level recommendation for countering account takeover and new-account fraud - delivered as a prioritised backlog the bank began acting on immediately.
Project Impact & Velocity
A strategic direction, delivered as a phased backlog.
The challenge
Out of quick fixes.
The bank was losing money to a rising wave of account takeover and new-account fraud, and the losses were reaching the loan book. Tactical fixes had stopped the bleeding, but at a price: a 20% rise in false positives and friction for legitimate customers.
A cross-test of a second document-verification engine against the same cases caught only a handful more and introduced false positives of its own. Swapping vendors was not the answer, and the board wanted a strategic direction rather than another patch.
What we did
From landscape to a ranked, sequenced backlog.
The Outcome
The leverage was layering signals, not swapping vendors — delivered as a phased, ranked backlog.
14 initiatives
Ranked on cost of delay against duration, then sequenced into a phased backlog.
6 in motion
Already in proof-of-concept, vendor negotiation or internal analysis by the time the report landed.
Why it worked
Key drivers behind our success.
Technologies & standards
Behavioural biometrics
Passive signals from how a user actually behaves
Phone intelligence
SIM-swap and number-risk signals
NFC chip verification
Reading the document chip, not just its image
Mule account detection
Spotting the exit route for stolen funds
Graph intelligence
Links across accounts, devices and payees
Digital footprint analysis
Email, device and identity-history checks
Fraud intelligence networks
Shared risk signals across institutions
Verification of Payee
Confirming the destination before payment