Today we officially announced FortiFI, the latest addition to our suite of customer acquisition solutions for financial institutions (view
press release here). FortiFI is a new kind of fraud prevention system that uses real-time data patterns to stop online account opening fraud before it's too late, and fills a gap in the market we've observed directly through experience and customer feedback.
In a nutshell, the idea is that our 500+ financial institution customers represent a significant portion of the banks and credit unions who open accounts online today, which gives us an incredible look down into application patterns that are only visible at wide scale.
For example, let's say a fraud ring steals a victim's credit file, and uses it to apply for checking accounts at a number of different financial institutions with the intent of overdrawing them or utilizing pre-approved loans. The individual banks take the losses, report the identity to the credit bureaus, and by then the fraud ring is on to the next victim.
FortiFI is able to intervene early on, before most banks get hit – when it sees patterns representing elements of common identities or usage patterns multiple times across our customer base, it is able to flag subsequent applications in real time and quarantine them before they get through. Of course sophisticated fraud rings use patterns that are more complex than a common identity, and the beauty of FortiFI is that it is tuned to pick up on subtleties, learns over time, and adapts to emerging patterns automatically as the fraudsters evolve.
FortiFI will be pre-integrated with our account opening platform, as well as available independently through an API within our developer platform so that financial institutions using home-grown or competitive account opening systems can integrate with it seamlessly.