“FICO’s latest report of UK card trends — for October 2022 — illustrates the push and pull of personal finances as consumers attempt to manage existing credit commitments while facing an increased cost of living. Highlights:  Average total sales were 5 percent lower than September at £740; The average active balance on credit card accounts also dropped in October to £1,570 – 1.5 percent lower than September…”

“Global analytics software provider FICO won the Machine Learning in Credit and Collections Award at the 2022 Credit & Collections Technology Awards, held in London in late November. The award was for an advanced scam detection model, which is available to lenders using the Retail Banking model in FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager, the world’s leading payments fraud protection solution. The proliferation of mobile payment apps, new open banking standards and consumer stress caused by the global pandemic have caused Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams to grow at an alarming rate. This financial crime occurs when a customer is manipulated into sending money to an account controlled by the scammer. In the UK alone, according to UK Finance, 2022 saw a 30% increase in APP scams, as compared to 2020, with losses totalling £249M in the six months measured in their October 2022 report. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, person-to-person (P2P) payment fraud grew 18% from 2020 to 2021 with an estimated 18 million Americans scammed using P2P applications. “Scams fraud is difficult to identify because the payment is authorized by the customer, so you can’t detect it just by looking at traditional third-party fraud indicators,” said Scott Zoldi, chief analytics officer at FICO. “Using proprietary machine learning techniques, we developed unique features and specialized algorithms to identify this behavior and the likelihood of a scam in real time.”

“FICO’s latest global fraud survey has revealed that 1 in 6 Indian consumers will leave for a competitor if unsatisfied with their bank’s fraud management response. This comes at a point, post-pandemic, where 4 in 5 consumers say they will continue to do all their banking online in an environment where India reported the highest fraud rate in the global survey of a dozen countries. With India boasting 670 million banking customers, this 1 in 6 Indian consumers still represents churn of up to 107 million people which delivers an opportunity for institutions that can best manage the problem.”