HSBC adopts SAS enterprise fraud system

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LONDON - UK bank HSBC has announced that it is implementing a new enterprise-wide anti-fraud management system designed by business intelligence firm SAS.

The two firms are working to expand the SAS fraud management system's capabilities from the debit and credit card fraud management to provide a system across the bank's businesses and operations.

SAS says this means tracking activity at customer, account and channel level, to mitigate risks of internal frauds at the bank, branch banking risks, bank transfer frauds and online payment frauds.

HSBC rolled out its fraud management package in 2007 and SAS says its systems are now running in the bank's operations in the UK, where debit and credit card fraud focus is being rolled out on an enterprise-wide basis, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

The bank's branches in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Macau, Brunei and Sri Lanka are running the system for credit card transactions in real time.

"Despite growing investment in fraud prevention in Asia-Pacific, card fraud is a growing issue and fraud schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated," says John Foulley, head of banking financial services solutions at SAS Asia-Pacific.

"Common issues in this region are application fraud, identity fraud and card fraud. The challenge is for banks to ensure they have dynamic and integrated fraud detection mechanisms in place that are geo-specific," he says.

Fraud reporting is expected to rise during the recession as firms rein in budgets, tighten controls, employees come under heightened pressure and markets shrink below their high watermarks to reveal incidents of financial crime.