Swiss cantonal bank BLKB turns to NetGuardians to fight payment fraud

NetGuardians, a Switzerland-based provider of financial fraud prevention solutions, has signed Basellandschaftliche Kantonalbank (BLKB) as a new client.

BLKB fights financial fraud with NetGuardians

BLKB selected NetGuardians’ fraud mitigation software and plans to go live with it in H2 this year.

“Everything we do is for our customers,” states Christoph Schaer, chief operating officer (COO) at BLKB.

“By working with NetGuardians we will be able to give them the best protection against fraudsters and improve our service to them.

“The accuracy of the software means we will only contact them when a transaction is highly likely to be fraud. This has two benefits – we will stop more fraud and contact our customers less often. It’s a win-win.”

BLKB has 850 employees, 25 branches and total assets of over CHF 32 billion ($32.8 billion).

NetGuardians says its software uses advanced behavioural analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to build up “highly accurate” customer profiles. All transactions linked to an account are continuously monitored across all channels, compared against the customer profile and given a risk score.

As a result, BLKB will experience a “massive reduction” in the number of false positives and will be able to cut back operational costs, the vendor says. It adds that banks using NetGuardians’ software have achieved an 85% reduction in customer friction and benefit from more than 75% lower operating costs.

NetGuardians’ software is used by around 80 banks and wealth managers across 30 countries, including 40% of all cantonal banks in Switzerland (there are 24 of them). Last month, it announced another cantonal bank as a client, Luzerner Kantonalbank (LUKB).