IRIS Analytics, a provider of web fraud prevention technology and consultancy services to the payments industry, and Wincor Nixdorf, a provider of IT solutions and services to retailers and retail banking, have struck an agreement to support QIWI, a NASDAQ-listed Russian multi-channel provider of payment services, with complete fraud prevention system IRIS 5 in its fight against fraud. IRIS 5 is now protecting QIWI’s network of over 100,000 self-service kiosks and 15 million e-wallets.
The value added by IRIS resides in combining transaction streams of financial data for all lines of business with non-financial transaction, according to Sergey Soldatov, General Manager Banking of Wincor-Nixdorf Russia.
The relevance of this approach has been illustrated when Russia, almost instantly, went through a severe attack by criminals using counterfeit 1,000 and 5,000 rouble notes. These notes could not trick the human eye, but could trick the banknote scanner model used in nearly all Russian cash accepting kiosks and ATMs. Because of the large scale of the attack, many Russian banks had to disable the acceptance of 1,000 and 5,000 rouble notes, which meant virtually having to close their ‘shop’ to customers.
However, in that context, QIWI was able to keep operating. Anton Kuranda, Chief Security Officer of QIWI explains: “By using IRIS, we were able to analyse the denomination of banknotes inserted, profile the kiosks and follow the money trail through our Visa QIWI Wallet. We were able to prevent fraud while continuing to accept banknotes”. This meant that the 60 million customers using QIWI every month could continue to pay their utility bills, loan instalments and other payments that they otherwise would have had trouble doing.
IRIS is an end-to-end solution that can be installed on QIWI’s existing commodity server cluster and, due to this fact, the entire implementation project took only five weeks. This incorporated all fraud model generation required for the prevention of the specific fraud patterns QIWI had been experiencing.
IRIS and Wincor Nixdorf have been cooperating to provide transaction security since 2010. Wincor Nixdorf distributes IRIS software worldwide. The company also offers the software to customers as an integral part of its PC/E Banking Solution Suite.