GBG Adds BioCatch Behavioural Biometrics to Fraud Tools for APAC Banks

Digital identity specialist GBG has signed a partnership with BioCatch, a provider of behavioural biometric fraud detection. GBG, which helps businesses prevent fraud and meet complex compliance requirements, says the tie-up will make its fraud prevention and detection more accurate and give financial institutions (FIs) in Asia Pacific simple access to added dynamic data intelligence through the GBG Intelligence Centre.

Mobile banking growth brings more fraud

As digital services become part of daily life across the region, the preference for mobile and online channels has spread to banking and finance. Globally, 38.7 per cent of consumers use mobile apps for banking. The share is higher in New Zealand (51 per cent), Singapore (55.8 per cent) and Thailand (68.1 per cent). Growing reliance on smartphones for online and mobile banking has been followed by a sharp rise in fraud. A new IDC study commissioned by GBG, titled Next-Gen Financial Crime Management Solution, expects social engineering crime to be a threat after the Covid-19 pandemic, and FIs have responded by concentrating on automating their fraud, compliance and cybersecurity tools and bringing them together.

Dev Dhiman, managing director for APAC at GBG, said mobile devices are quickly becoming central to how consumers in the region bank and make financial transactions. Combined with digitalisation, he said, an increasingly interconnected financial system is driving growth in fraud and giving rise to what GBG calls Financial Crime 4.0. In his view, threats such as social engineering and money mule scams show the need for trusted financial crime management systems that are easy to deploy and extend strong fraud protection to mobile services.

Dhiman described the BioCatch partnership as central to GBG's commitment to keep improving its fraud and compliance products for FIs in APAC. Adding BioCatch's behavioural biometric detection to GBG's network of trusted partners, he said, will help those institutions take a pre-emptive, holistic approach against highly organised and complex financial criminals.

What BioCatch brings

BioCatch's 2021 Fraud Transformation Survey: Detecting and Preventing Emerging Schemes found that two in three FIs plan to raise spending on fraud management resources that use behavioural biometrics. Under the partnership, FIs using the GBG Intelligence Centre can apply BioCatch's behavioural biometric product to stop social engineering scams, account takeovers and fraudulent account opening, and to detect mule accounts.

Richard Booth, vice president of sales for EMEA and APAC at BioCatch, said the region's growing appetite for online and mobile banking gives FIs a chance to use digital behaviour data and insights to stop fraud and scams. Through the partnership, he said, FIs will be able to use BioCatch's machine learning system, which processes more than a trillion unique digital interactions every month, to spot unusual and suspicious behaviour on their digital platforms. He said BioCatch looks forward to delivering accurate, real-time fraud prevention by combining the two companies' products.

The GBG Intelligence Centre gives FIs access to a broad financial crime ecosystem of data and technology, with end-to-end digital fraud and compliance products. GBG's other offerings include Loqate, its own location intelligence and address verification product, and greenID, IDScan and ID3Global for end-to-end digital identity verification.

IDC Financial Insights has named GBG among the world's top 100 fintech providers. The company was also the Enterprise Fraud Category Leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant 2021 and received the Best Machine Learning/AI Innovation of the Year award at the Asia Risk Awards the previous year.