Given the mass adoption of online banking and the rapid emergence of mobile banking, the time is now for issuers to embrace new technologies as a way to engage customers in the fight against fraud. These steps include:
Embrace Mobility – ACI’s Smartphonatic research from earlier in 2012 clearly showed that the future of payments and banking is mobile. Not only are emerging economies relying heavily on mobile, the data also indicates that younger demographics are predisposed to using mobile devices to manage their financial lives. Just as financial institutions saw customers moving to the web and followed, they must now embrace the mobile channel to keep up with customer needs.
Communicate with Customers – Customers want to notified when important account events take place. Widely available, proven technology makes it easy to meet this need. Mobile, text and e-mail messaging allow financial institutions to contact customers in real time, to inform them of specific incidents or to share broader communications related to general threats. Social media can also be leveraged to achieve this goal. These communications provide a great opportunity to keep customers informed and build a stronger long term relationship based on trust and transparency. This beats the alternative, which is the customer moving the card to back of wallet or taking their card relationships to another institution entirely.
Continue to Educate – One finding I consider discouraging was related to consumer security practices. It appears that consumers either aren’t hearing the message regarding good card security practices, or the messages aren’t clear enough. The data indicates not only that well known risks such as writing down PINs and using unsecure computers are still occurring, they are actually on the rise. This is a sign that consumers need even more education about what they can do to help prevent fraud and identity theft. With the right investment in consumer education and awareness, financial institutions stand to receive a substantial return in the form of reduced fraud losses, improved operational efficiency and higher customer satisfaction.
ACI Enterprise Payments Platform 
