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Hosted Call Centers are a Trove of Important Data

By TMCnet Staff

In the cat-and-mouse game that is fraud prevention, the contact center is an underutilized resource for those looking to prevent fraudulent banking activity.

Many fraud attempts start at the contact center level, said fraud expert Matt Anthony, who will be presenting on the topic at the upcoming Fraud Summits in Toronto and London later this year. If fraud prevention can leverage contact center data and logs, bank account takeover attempts are much easier to prevent.

Most financial institutions fail to correlate contact center data with suspicious online banking activity, he noted, and this is a big missed opportunity for predictively preventing such hijacking.

The contact center is a big help because many fraud attempts start by criminals exploiting contact centers through getting critical account information from unsuspecting agents.

“A large number of institutions undercount their phone fraud,” Anthony noted, wrongly linking the fraud to other channels.

His firm, Pindrop, has shown the power of mining this contact center data for fraud prevention.

Startlingly, Pindrop was able to identify 228 criminal gangs whose patterns were detectable 80 percent of the time after sifting through 105 million calls made to banking-institution call centers during the second half of 2013, according to the company.

Through analysis of contact center data, the financial institutions involved in the study were able to predict account-takeover attacks 16 days before they were actually attempted. The key technique was identifying the so-called probing-for-information calls that often are placed before a criminal organization attempts an account takeover.

This is a startlingly high success rate, showing the potential of contact center data analysis.

Extrapolating on the data, Pindrop’s achievement also signals the overall power of contact center data. While many companies are now starting to leverage speech analytics and contact center data for business insight, much of the opportunity still goes untapped.

A vast amount of information passes through the contact center, and smart businesses can take advantage of this data to infer trends and areas for adjustment. Whether it’s for fraud prevention or business advantage, mining contact center data can be a powerful tool.