TJ Horan

With temperatures frequently north of 100º, Arizona gets mighty hot in the summer. It turns out that during the summer of COVID-19, it’s also a hotbed of money muling, a criminal act that can be defined as: The role of transferring stolen funds. Typically, money mules are unwittingly tricked into depositing a fraudulent check into a bank account or into receiving…

Welcome to another instalment of “Confessions of a Payments Professional.” This week’s reveal: prior to March 2020, I had never used the mobile deposit feature of the banking app on my phone. Since then, I’ve deposited nearly a dozen checks using this nifty capability. What does it mean? First, I still get a lot of paper checks. Second, after I figured out how to use…

As a result of COVID-19, the use of contactless payments is expected to rise 10–15% in the U.S. according to  Mercator Advisory Group Analyst Peter Reville.  This is an estimate he shared in a recent American Banker article. And we’re continuing to see increases of its usage worldwide.  With this uptick in usage leaving many wondering just how secure th…

As I discussed in my last post, the convergence of fraud and financial crime management is finally reaching a tipping point. I discussed this trend in my recent webinar, Fraud & Financial Crime Convergence: Demanding Smarter Decisions and in this post, for those of you that are tired of streaming, I’ll highlight some of the key thoughts that you can speed read.&nb…

It feels like we have been discussing the convergence of fraud and financial crime for at least a decade. I’ve certainly shared my views and predictions, including one of my recent blog posts Fraud and Financial Crime Product Strategy: C is for Convergence, but just in time for summer, the strategy is finally making a splash. As my colleague Sarah Rutherford shared in…

I’m not big on reading tabloid confessions at the grocery checkout, but as a payments professional, I have a shocking admission to share: I am a late bloomer in adopting mainstream person-to-person (P2P) payment apps like Venmo, Cash App (owned by Square), Snapcash and a slew of others. Maybe it’s because I am a late Baby Boomer that I still view Venmo, specifically,…

For a while now, folks at FICO have been talking about the convergence of fraud- and financial crime-fighting data, processes and systems. And with good reason—all signs indicate this direction to be the most efficient for banks, the most beneficial for customers, and the most aligned with regulation. In this blog I’ll reprise the product strategy version of the conve…

“It Could Happen to You” might be one of the cheesiest movies of the 1990s (71% on Rotten Tomatoes) but in making my fraud predictions for 2020, the title has an ominous ring to it. Unlike the movie’s lucky lottery-winning Nicolas Cage, “it could happen to you” means that you, a family member, or someone you know will be a victim of a scam or other major fraud this co…

As far as industry predictions go, perhaps surprisingly, one of mine actually came true: “2018 will be the beginning of the end for physical credit cards. However, their functionality will become even more omnipresent in our lives as more cards migrate to consumers’ mobile phones.” It’s true that more and more Americans are adopting mobile payments. In May Recode rep…

This holiday season should be a joyous one — for criminals. Holiday spending always makes it easier for fraudsters to steal your money, for two reasons. First, you may be so busy with shopping and parties that you don’t take that extra minute to scrutinize an email link that purports to come from a store or delivery service. People in a rush are also more susceptible…

For more than 25 years, the Falcon consortium has served as the world’s largest collection of payment card transaction details, consisting of the diverse fraud and non-fraud truncation assets that have spawned 80+ fraud-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning patents, with 30+ patents pending. It has provided a “force multiplier” effect that benefits cont…

This is the fifth in my series on five keys to using AI and machine learning in fraud detection. Fraudsters ensure that protecting customers’ accounts is very complex and dynamic, a challenge where machine learning thrives. For continual performance improvement, fraud detection professionals should consider adaptive technologies designed to sharpen responses, particu…