How IBM Watson AI supports Borgun’s international growth

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”We can now go beyond the minimum requirements of our regulators and implement internal best practices for fraud monitoring, which will shrink our risk exposure further still. As our markets become more competitive, having a platform such as IBM Safer Payments is crucial to react quickly to meet the new challenges.”

– Steen Henriksen, Chief Risk Officer, Borgun

New regulatory procedures and requirements in the banking industry are being introduced more frequently. To cope with this development, payment services organizations must find efficient solutions to comply without suffering from extreme additional costs. Borgun, an Icelandic banking company, has achieved a 360-degree view of its issuing and acquiring operations by using IBM Safer Payments to limit exposure to compliance risks and set the scene for international growth and expansion.

Borgun, who?

Headquartered in Reykjavík, Iceland, Borgun was the countries first issuer and acquirer of credit cards. Today, the company provides acquiring services to merchants and issuing processing services to issuers of credit and debit cards in Iceland and other countries across Europe.

Aim?

To continue driving growth in international payment services, it is essential for Borgun to deal with regulatory compliance in a cost- and time effective way. But how could the company address regulations and requirements in the best possible way – for themselves and for costumers?

In the past, Borgun used various systems to monitor and report on its acquiring business simultaneously. To build reports for internal and external stakeholders, the company had to manually extract, collate and analyze data in spreadsheets – a costly and time consuming approach. 

How?

Borgun deployed IBM Safer Payments to face this major challenge for its business. With this scalable, cognitive fraud-prevention platform the company was able to not only reduce the cost of operating, but also minimize complexity and the time required to design and execute compliant strategies.

Sigurður Jakobsson, IT Implementation Specialist and Project Manager, Borgun comments:

“We felt that rule creation was an area that IBM Safer Payments performed strongly, and we were very satisfied with the platform’s ability to cover both our acquiring and issuing businesses. On the acquiring side, we gain the ability to block suspicious authorizations in real time instead of learning of them after the fact. Once our issuing implementation is complete, we will also be able to use business rules there to instantly decline authorization requests if the system detects a high possibility of fraud.”

Results?

• A reduction in time and cost of compliance projects, helping Borgun to adapt quickly to new regulations.
• An increased scalability to support ever-growing volumes of payment transactions.
• A real-time and batch monitoring system to help protect payments and data.

Future plans and perspectives

After deploying IBM Safer Payments and reducing the cost and time for designing and executing compliance strategies, Borgun can focus on enhancing security across its payments units. Steen Henriksen, Chief Risk Officer, Borgun, councludes:

“We can now go beyond the minimum requirements of our regulators and implement internal best practices for fraud monitoring, which will shrink our risk exposure further still. As our markets become more competitive, having a platform such as IBM Safer Payments is crucial to react quickly to meet the new challenges.”

Click here, to read more about how IBM supports Borgun’s international growth.

For any further questions do not hesitate to contact me at: NIKLASP@dk.ibm.com