PSCU credit unions have saved more than $100 million in declined fraud transactions over the past 12 months. Industry-wide, credit unions have incurred expenses from card reissuance and fraud totaling $87.4 million between the Target and Home Depot breaches.
PSCU is the nation’s leading credit union service organization (CUSO) and serves more than 1,500 financial institutions nationwide. The company is owned by over 800 member credit unions, representing 18.5 million credit, debit, prepaid, online bill payment, mobile and electronic banking accounts.
The CUSO’s use of custom fraud detection strategies, analytics and proactive account tagging and monitoring has delivered a fraud-to-sales loss ratio of 6.25 basis points (or $0.0625 fraud per $100 in sales) over that period, significantly lower than reported industry averages of between 11 and 14 basis points.
PSCU says it was quick to tag and monitor accounts when the Target and The Home Depot data breaches were publicly announced, even before the card brands had issued their compromise alerts bulletins to processors and issuers.
Furthermore, PSCU maintains two years’ worth of transactional history in its fraud analytics database, which feeds into its fraud detection platform to score each credit and debit transaction for the likelihood of fraud. The depth of its transaction database helps identify legitimate cardholder behavior patterns, and the custom fraud detection strategies enable PSCU to maintain a low false positive ratio.
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