Who Doesn’t Want Automated Fraud Alerts?

A recent FICO survey found that 91 percent of those surveyed were happy to receive automated messages to verify purchases with their payment cards, FICO’s Philip Doyle reported in the credit-scoring company’s Banking Analytics Blog.

Almost as many (89 percent) said automated confirmation increased their confidence in using their cards.

Banks that succeeded in bringing fraud levels down have focused on how to make the purchase process much more streamlined, Doyle wrote. That, in turn, allowed fraud losses to rise. To bring fraud back down again, banks are considering automated contacts and verification for many purchases. That has prompted some observers to suggest consumers will be barraged by annoying phone checks to verify transactions. The survey suggests that’s not so.

But what type of automated verification is appropriate may vary by bank and even by customer. “One FICO client has seen that customers aged 30-59 are 7 percent more likely to resolve fraud alerts by voice than customers aged 29 and under,” Doyle wrote. “Interestingly, another FICO client has seen that those aged 30 and under can be twice as likely to respond to an interactive SMS than older customers.”