Fraud Prevention: UBS Card Center Wins with FICO for 25 Years

At a fraud event last month, FICO honored the extraordinary achievements of UBS Card Center in fraud prevention using FICO^® Falcon^® Fraud Manager. Now, great results using FICO Falcon are nothing new – since 1992, when it was launched as the first AI-powered payment fraud detection system, it has saved card issuers tens of billions of dollars. Today it protects more than 4 billion payment cards, issued by 10,000+ financial institutions that contribute data to our FICO^® Falcon Intelligence Network.

But what distinguishes UBS Card Center is their history with FICO Falcon Fraud Manager — they have been using it for 25 years.

Since UBS Card Center went live with FICO Falcon in 1999, fraud losses on their portfolio were reduced to one-tenth.

That’s a fantastic result, made even more impressive by the rise in fraudulent activity, identity theft and scams globally. “We’re seeing unbelievable increases in traditional card-not-present fraud,” said Marcel Drescher, head of fraud services at UBS Card Center. “We’re also seeing a huge increase in phishing and social engineering, exploiting the customers as the weakest link in the chain.”

Despite this, UBS Card Center has produced award-winning fraud prevention results. Five years ago, they celebrated their 20^th anniversary using FICO Falcon by winning the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards. They are also a past recipient of a FICO Decisions Award.

Continuous Innovation in Fraud Prevention

Continuous innovations in FICO Falcon and updates to its models have provided a strong safeguard for UBS Card Center, while also enabling it to maintain a low false positive rate of around 1:3. “We went live with the European Credit model v17 one week ago,” Drescher announced at the event. “The evolution of our fraud protection strategy has been supported by the evolution of FICO Falcon Fraud Manager.”

As a July article in Australia’s Banking Day noted, “Since its introduction, Falcon has been consistently enhanced with cutting-edge innovations to stay ahead of evolving payment and banking trends, as well as the sophisticated fraud techniques that come with them. For example, debit card profiling was introduced in 1995 to protect the burgeoning use of debit cards, which grew from virtually zero in 1992 to over $95 billion today. ”

No other solution in the fraud protection space has this history of innovation:

Bringing the Falcon to Life

This innovation in fraud detection, done in partnership with FICO clients, leads to tremendous success for Falcon customers, who often become fierce advocates of the solution. Another such advocate is Australia’s ANZ Bank, an Australia-based multinational company providing banking and financial services to over 8.5 million retail and business customers across nearly 30 markets. Last year, Falcon helped ANZ prevent $112m from going to cybercriminals. ANZ just launched its second marketing campaign based on Falcon.

FICO Falcon Fraud Manager continues to provide noteworthy results for our customers and our partners, such as Dock, which won a 2023 FICO Decisions Award in fraud prevention for its use of Falcon and FICO® Customer Communication Services to stop more than $50 million in fraud per month.

We salute UBS Card Center and all the users of our solutions for their exemplary work to defeat fraudsters and protect their customers from fraud. We are proud to partner with you and pledge to match your commitment and innovation with ours.

How FICO Can Help You Fight Fraud

• Explore how FICO helps fight fraud, regardless of channel or portfolio.
• Get details about the FICO® Falcon® Intelligence Network
• Customer Communications Services for Fraud engages customers in real time to fight card and CNP fraud.
• Follow me on LinkedIn for more insights about FICO’s innovative fraud fighting efforts.