Fraud Management Technologies (FMT) today announced the release of FMT Octopus(TM) — revolutionary technology that transforms the way online fraud is prevented.

Discarding outdated conventional methods, FMT Octopus is the first risk software to embed in a bank's Web application server — functioning as a real-time, front-end fraud solution without requiring any changes to existing applications.

"By redesigning the way suspicious activity is detected, analysed and directed, we're changing banks' perceptions of e-security and risk management," says FMT CEO Kostas Siourthas. "With today's budgetary constraints and limited IT resources, it's never been more critical for financial institutions to take advantage of the results FMT Octopus delivers."

Online activities including credit applications, banking transactions, account servicing and merchant payments are sent through FMT's proprietary pre-processing filter, which assesses transactions in real time before they complete — plugging the holes left by other back-end, after-event products.

All other solutions analyse data after an e-application has been processed, with suspect activities routed through application programming interfaces (APIs). FMT Octopus exclusively eliminates the need for APIs.

A 15 January 2007 Gartner report titled "Findings: Architectural Options for Integrating Fraud Detection" estimates by 2009 at least 50 percent of online fraud detection engines will be integrated directly into Web application servers (0.7 probability).

IBM is working with FMT as one of its Business Partners and will incorporate FMT Octopus into its security products offered throughout Australia and New Zealand. It will enable the vendor to provide infrastructure security for financial institutions seeking to combat online fraud.

Installation of FMT Octopus in several multi-national banks took less than two hours. In addition, a test at IBM's Innovation Centre resulted in 8.4 million decisions per hour.

The software — which is contained in a single, integrated application providing rules and policies controlled by each bank — constantly analyses each transaction. It can request additional authentication or refer transactions to a bank's risk team, providing data in their format of choice to import into existing case management, analytics and reporting systems.

FMT Octopus is easy to install, platform, operating system, database and application server independent, and openly integrates with existing legacy systems to examine enormous volumes of information in isolation and in context. Authentication options include two-factor requests and human intervention.

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