Memento and IBM Join Forces to Help Financial Institutions Fight Fraud

Memento, a provider of enterprise fraud management, has reached an agreement with IBM to deliver fraud detection solutions to the financial services industry. The two companies will jointly develop, market and sell innovative, next-generation solutions for monitoring, detecting and investigating a wide variety of fraud types, including deposit account fraud, new account fraud and insider fraud.

Fraud is a widespread problem affecting banks and other types of financial institutions. According to analyst firm TowerGroup, 20 to 35% of the $55 billion in operational losses incurred by financial institutions are due to fraud. Cross-channel fraud -- involving multiple banking products (e.g., checks, debit cards, wire transfers) and account access methods (online, branch visits, call centers) -- is a growing part of the problem. In addition, fraud is increasingly a business, characterized by highly leveraged schemes and groups of professional, organized criminals using stolen and synthetic identities, and real identities of vulnerable individuals to open accounts for the sole purpose of committing fraud. Existing financial crime detection systems are often ineffective against these advanced fraud schemes because they rely on relatively simple screening, detection and compliance monitoring techniques, according to Memento and IBM.

IBM's InfoSphere(TM) Global Name Recognition is an enterprise tool designed to help organizations understand, analyze and process multi-cultural names to provide name processing and matching capabilities for mission critical and corporate wide applications. GNR provides enterprises with the tools to get multi-cultural name information, analytics and high performance name matching through a series of flexible, easy-to-integrate, SOA enabled interfaces, enabling customers to unlock and unleash the wealth of information in a name. "New products and channels expose financial institutions to ever more sophisticated types of fraud, and effective defenses have taken too long to develop," says Rob Thomas, vice president, IBM Information Management, in a press release. "IBM InfoSphere Global Name Recognition software plays a powerful role in detecting fraud through its world-class name recognition, analysis and matching capabilities. Now embedded with InfoSphere GNR, Memento will deliver even greater value for our joint customers," he added.