News

Westpac New Zealand launches ACI fraud-detection solution on IBM System z

June 16, 2009

NEW YORK — ACI Worldwide Inc. has announced the launch of ACI Proactive Risk Manager for Enterprise Risk solution on IBM System z at Westpac New Zealand, one of the country's largest full-service banks.

According to a news release, Westpac New Zealand is working with ACI to strengthen its fraud detection and prevention capabilities to protect against the rising volume of fraudulent activities occurring worldwide.

"Within a few days of implementing ACI's Proactive Risk Manager, it alerted us to fraud, which we were then able to prevent," said Terry Mortensen, head of fraud and security at Westpac New Zealand. "Immediately, we were confident in assuring our customers, and prospective customers, that we can provide them the risk-free service they need in the current financial climate."

Westpac New Zealand implemented real-time rules to monitor potentially suspicious transactions within the authorization process, therefore identifying and preventing fraud. The configurable rules scoring engine gives the bank the agility to respond to changing fraud patterns.

"Effective enterprise-wide fraud management is not easy to achieve. It not only requires significant processing power and scalability to handle the data volume and throughput, but also sophisticated functionality to enable accurate fraud detection," said June Felix, general manager for banking and financial markets at IBM. "Proactive Risk Manager on IBM System z servers can help provide Westpac New Zealand with the capability to take a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to managing financial crimes and operational risk."

ACI now works with more than 10 major banks in Australia and New Zealand that have licensed Proactive Risk Manager. Globally, more than 150 banks, processors and retailers rely on Proactive Risk Manager to monitor transactions at an enterprise level to identify and prevent fraud on debit, credit and corporate cards; checks; online banking; and merchants; and to detect money-laundering activity. Another 1,000 financial institutions access Proactive Risk Manager services through processor relationships.