Fraud or financial crimes are some of the fastest growing offences in the financial world, and banks in particular are the biggest targets of these fraudulent activities. As financial crime continues to rise, a growing concern for banks is to combat persistent insider threats. While they adopt better governance structures and regulations to resolve this, solutions that help them manage and monitor such threats are likely to have a long-term impact in controlling their overall costs. The market is huge and demand is growing for such solutions. This is quite evident from NICE Actimize’s recent move to extend its partnership with banking and payments technology provider, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS).

Under the expanded alliance program, NICE Actimize, a subsidiary of NICE Systems and provider of financial crime, risk and compliance software solutions for the financial services industry, will implement its Employee Fraud Detection solution with FIS’ core processing systems. The joint offering, targeted towards the banking industry, aims to help banks integrate enterprise financial crime services to create a single financial crime integration hub. The new integrated platform will also allow financial institutions to integrate third-party fraud management solutions. The combined solution will initially be offered to FIS’ core banking customer base in the US. There are plans to make the solution available to wider geographies after the collaboration successfully implements the solution in the region.

The two companies collaborated first in 2008 to offer a combined solution for enterprise fraud management to the financial services industry. Employee Fraud Detection solution of Actimize is an enterprise-wide fraud suite that enables fraud protection across multiple channels including cards, remote banking, deposits, and electronic payments. The solution also provides alerts by monitoring various potentially suspicious employee behaviour.

Bruno Piers de Raveschoot, managing director, head of NICE Actimize Europe and Asia Pacific talks about NICE Actimize’s extended partnership with FIS and the growing importance of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and fraud management solutions for financial institutions in an exclusive interview with CRO.

CRO : Selection of the right partner is one of the most critical factors for the success of such collaboration. Which were the major reasons for your selection of FIS Global as a long-term strategic partner?

Piers : FIS is recognised as a trusted global leader in the financial services industry, with extensive reach and breadth in products. As with any long-term strategic relationship, many factors were considered in the process.