Rank Group gets the upper hand with Feedzai’s Genome
The Challenge
Rank Group, the U.K. based multi-channel casino operator, is on a mission to bring people together for fun and entertainment. Their brands include Grosvenor Casinos, Mecca bingo clubs, and Enracha, a community-based gaming business for the Spanish market.
“It used to take us half a day to connect all the disparate events in a complex fraud scheme, now it takes us 10 minutes.”
— David Reid, Head of Fraud and KYC
The competitive UK gambling industry has over 500 operators. In this crowded field, providing exceptional customer experiences and developing strategic product offerings are critical to success. With this in mind, Rank Group launched a new omnichannel wallet for casinos called Grosvenor 1.
Grosvenor 1 links a player’s digital wallet to the casino and provides exclusive rewards and offers for these high-value, omnichannel customers. While the product aligned perfectly with Rank Group’s goals, it presented additional financial crime risks.
Grosvenor 1 enables omnichannel transactions which bring additional potential risks for money laundering and fraud. Additionally, digital wallets make it easy to hide a user’s identity. One can buy a burner phone or US debit card information stolen from the dark web, and quickly load it to a digital wallet. Merchants, banks, and consumers won’t know the person behind the mobile device because it is prepaid. From an anti-money laundering perspective, it’s easy for criminals to make the wallet disappear after they’ve used it to launder money. They can get rid of the phone.
Taking a proactive stance to deal with the potential risks involved with Grosvenor 1, Rank Group reached out to experts and were advised to incorporate a robust machine learning transaction monitoring solution to prevent both fraud and money laundering.
The most critical selection criteria for Rank Group was a fraud prevention and anti-money laundering tool that met regulatory requirements and addressed the omnichannel risks involved with Grosvenor 1. The other top concern was the ability to quickly identify financial crime.
For the Rank Group’s industry and business model, monitoring transactions for financial crime is only a piece of what is potentially a bigger picture. Fraudsters have been moving away from transactional fraud and devising multi-dimensional tactics. Organizations detect this type of fraud with expert analysis, not just transaction monitoring technology. Investigations to “connect the dots” of financial crime were a time-consuming and manual process. They required digging up data and cutting and pasting information into spreadsheets, which is prone to errors. The whole process could take half a day to resolve a complicated case, which reduces the time the fraud operations team can spend on other activities.
Why Rank Group choose Feedzai
Rank Group selected Feedzai because Feedzai’s intelligent platform ingests and transforms multiple data streams and fraud insights across any channel, then enriches the data to create hypergranular risk profiles. Feedzai’s machine learning then works to process events and transactions in milliseconds and delivers explainable A.I. by adding a human-readable semantic layer to the underlying machine logic. Not only would this satisfy regulatory requirements, but it also provided an efficient method for explaining an analyst’s decision-making process to regulators.
Still, it was Feedzai’s dynamic visualization engine, Genome, that provided extra value. Genome leverages Feedzai’s powerful AI technology and integrates with our entire platform. It provides an intuitive way for investigators and data analysts to quickly identify emerging financial crime patterns because it improves the depth and efficiency of risk assessment.
Genome makes visible the hidden connections among transactions. It is an easy way to “follow the money” — investigators can click to expand details for transaction after transaction, instead of performing many manual searches and keeping track of results in a spreadsheet.
Genome in action
Step 1
Rank opens a fraud case within Feedzai Case Manager.Feedzai Genome shows two customers (green icon) using the same card (blue icon) on two different transactions (grey icon).
Step 2
Expanding on the card to find additional customers, Feedzai Genome uncovers three customers using the same card. The third customer is also using a second card.
Step 3
Expanding on the second card to find additional customers, Feedzai Genome uncovers three customers using the second card. This connection had not initially been flagged as fraudulent by the transaction monitoring platform.
Step 4
Expanding on the five customers and their transactions, Feedzai Genome uncovered that five customers are using two cards.
Genome enables investigators to perform more in-depth, more accurate investigations. And by intuitively guiding investigators through relationships, Feedzai Genome provides confidence and explainability in risk score decisions.
Feedzai Genome also deepens risk assessment because patterns, not just flagged transactions, are reviewed. Reviewing patterns allows investigators and data analysts to increase the number of reviewed transactions. As a result, fewer false negatives slip through the cracks.
Results
Rank Group satisfied the need for robust transaction monitoring technology and boosted operational efficiency by 95%. Additionally, by implementing Genome, Rank Group increased fraud detection on specific alerts by 15% and realized cost savings of £12,000 in minutes. Working with Feedzai, Rank Group quickly reacts to new fraud patterns with powerful rules that stay one step ahead of fraudsters. David Reid, Head of Fraud and KYC at The Rank Group, said, “It used to take us half a day to connect all the disparate events in a complex fraud scheme, now it takes us 10 minutes.”