According to data from the FTC, there were 390,000 cases of credit card fraud in 2021 alone. That’s roughly one case every 32 seconds. Credit card fraud is ever-present and ever-changing as the cat-and-mouse game between cardholders and fraudsters changes with each new advancement in the world of financial technology.
When you’re an Issuing bank (i.e., the bank that issues cards to consumers for their personal use), you worry about the users and their financial security. When you’re an Acquiring bank, you worry that businesses will be left holding the bag on fraudulent charges and exploitative attacks (skimmers on POS terminals, false cards used to float major transactions, etc.). If you happen to be both an Issuing and Acquiring bank, as our strategic partner MVB Bank, Member FDIC is, you have to understand and assess the risks for both consumers and merchants.
For many Acquiring institutions, the process of transaction data assessment is a largely manual one, which is both time-consuming and costly. MVB turned to Trabian to collaborate on a new approach that would smooth the process and open up new opportunities for automation.
The Trabian team’s work supports MVB’s strategic directive to better align internal technology with external regulatory requirements for a complex bank. Also, the work positions MVB for planned strategic growth and to operate at scale more efficiently.”
Jacob Eisen, Fintech President
Understanding the landscape
Banks of all sizes face regulatory burdens and compliance demands, especially where credit cards, debit cards and other payments are involved. Part of the process of assessing these risks is having insight into the data that is shared by the biggest players in the industry.
Trabian set to work, eager to understand the transaction data and the ISO risk indicators that come from transaction processors such as industry leading processes supporting Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) and other Fintech clients who, in turn, offer insight into any large retailer or service provider that takes payments from consumers.
"Our team loves to solve problems. You can break our work down into three areas: expertise (we haven't done this before, but we will figure it out), experience (we've done this many times), and efficiency (not only have we done this multiple times but we've packaged it into a product). Working with large data sets to create cohesive workflows opened the opportunity to move from expertise to efficiency, so this work with MVB was exciting to us,” said Madeline Chickedantz, Trabian’s Chief of Staff.
In the world of transaction processing, there’s one brand that sets the pace for Issuers and Acquirers with regard to security standards: Visa. MVB had already undergone a Global Acquirer Risk Standards (GARS) review with Visa, but the next hurdle to clear was the High-Brand Risk Merchant Registration program, a set of requirements that applies to businesses that deal with companies and industries prone to chargebacks, disputes, and fraud. Because of MVB’s relationship with online gaming and emerging currency markets (crypto, etc.), they were required to show that they had a more rigorous, thorough process in place to assess risks.
Right away, a pain point emerged: when given ISO risk indicators and transaction files from the various transaction processors, there was no single file type or standard; data is presented in various formats, which can make it difficult to process as a cohesive set.
Instead of mandating a single file type from each processor, Trabian sought to make the process of ingesting data as painless as possible. The solution? Securely acquire files from partners in their initial formats, then convert the data into a new, more consistent format. The now-streamlined data is then suitable for integration into various third-party tools used for tasks like risk assessment or data visualization.
“Trabian’s approach to use the data from industry leading processors demonstrated adaptability while supporting the needs of Acquiring risk. This also meant that our partner’s processors did not have change their processes or data which supported our implementation activities and with minimal costs incurred by our partners. In our industry, that is a “win-win” approach for now and the future.”
Jacinthia Lawson, Senior Vice President,
Acquiring and Payments Sponsorships
Making order out of chaos
Trabian utilized Metabase to create functional, easy-to-understand dashboards of the data that was most important to the monitoring process. Visualization is crucial not just at a corporate level, but at a human level. Individuals needed to be able to see trends that a cascade of numbers and figures might not instantly reveal. The custom dashboard greatly reduced the complexity of the task and cut down the manual workload for MVB’s risk management teams.
With the implementation of this new approach, MVB was able to satisfy Visa’s requirements for High-Brand Risk Merchant registration, a license not many other banks receive. This means that MVB has demonstrated their ability to manage regulatory concerns and to combat fraud and improve reputation impact, not only for their organization and their related users and merchants, but for the world of payment card processing as a whole.
“Working with the Trabian team contributed to scaling our activities, increasing efficiencies, while aligning to our internal controls and complying with card brand requirements.”
Brandon Sparks, Vice President,
Fintech Acquiring Risk
Following the success of this program, MVB and Trabian have turned their attention to a number of additional areas in need of better data orchestration. Trabian has also expanded its data engineering services to assist with analytics, workflow automations and real-time alerts about potential problems in other areas.
“At Trabian, we have a knack for finding new and better ways of doing things. The best reward has been hearing directly from MVB team members that our work has saved them time, made their day-to-day operations easier, and helped them discover insights that were hidden before, and we’re eager to do the same for more of our clients,” said Matt Dean, CEO of Trabian.
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