MACH, the leading provider of cloud-based managed communication services, today announced that through its Fraud Management System – FAME – it analyzes more than 100 million customer transactions daily to identify and report suspicious call patterns that indicate a fraud is being perpetrated. Through such analysis and reporting, operators can quickly act to counter fraud, enabling them to substantially reduce unnecessary revenue leakage.

Fraud is a major issue for the telecoms industry; the Communications Fraud Control Association suggests it may cost as much as US$80bn per year in lost revenue.¹ MACH currently reports cases of potential fraud to its customers around the world on voice, SMS and data usage. Customers share data with MACH in near real-time, allowing transaction records to be analyzed on a 24/7 basis and any unusual behaviour to be flagged almost immediately. Of the 100 million transactions analyzed daily by MACH, around 1200 cases are flagged and investigated by the MACH team, and, of these, a daily average of 190 cases of potential fraud are passed on to customers. Once customers are alerted to a potential fraud, they can take a number of actions, from calling the subscriber to check if the transactions are genuine, to barring an individual account, or identifying associates of the subscriber to stop the fraud from spreading.

Joseph George, Director, Revenue Protection and Interconnect, MACH, commented: “It’s fantastic to have reached this milestone figure of 100 million transactions analyzed daily as it demonstrates how efficient our platform is. With falling ARPUs and greater competition in the telecoms industry, acting to counter revenue losses from fraud is essential. Fraud is big business: it's global, it's organised, it's sophisticated and it can happen at any time, anywhere and have a devastating effect on revenues. The faster potential leaks can be detected in real-time, the more money can be saved. Operators are now turning to fraud management solutions with a large data-handling capability and the architecture to be able to analyze it straight away. It’s great to see MACH leading the field in terms of these capabilities and dramatically reducing exposure to fraud for our customers.”

MACH’s FAME solution uses unique in-memory computing technology for ‘Big Data’ analysis, which provides rapid insights. By accessing data in Random Access Memory (RAM) rather than on traditional disk, user requests are able to interact with data which is already loaded into system memory, streamlining the process and providing a quicker, more efficient experience.

George concluded: “As we look ahead to 4G, the number of transactions mobile operators will be required to analyze will increase dramatically, so this type of real-time, ‘en masse’ analytics is only going to become more essential. In-memory computing and analytics provide a massive advantage in terms of speed here. These techniques also allow quick response to ‘what if?’ queries, meaning analysts can predict potential revenue leakage situations and receive not just the possible loss outcome, but also information about how to respond to a particular case.”

Part of the M Protect portfolio, the MACH FAME platform supports a full suite of functions to minimise fraud-related revenue leakage, including domestic and international fraud management. M Protect presents a comprehensive revenue protection platform, which also supports revenue assurance and data retention, and provides tangible cost benefits in terms of process alignment and efficiency gains. The platform can be adopted through a licensed software model, cloud-based delivery or a managed service approach.

-ENDS-

About MACH

MACH is the leading provider of cloud-based, managed communications services for monetizing mobile data, simplifying interoperability between networks, optimizing wholesale processes and protecting revenues. It is fast becoming the provider of choice for real-time, value added services that are essential for communications service providers around the globe to enhance customer experience, optimize wholesale processes and monetize their businesses in 3G and 4G mobile ecosystems. With its long heritage in data and financial clearing, settlement and hub based connectivity models, it provides its 650 operator customers with state-of-the-art tools needed to align business processes. Headquartered in Luxembourg, MACH has offices in 12 countries. Its customers include Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Telus, Verizon Wireless and Microsoft, as well as enterprise messaging customers like KLM. For more information, visit www.mach.com, follow MACHconnects on Twitter or read The MACH Blog.

¹ Source: Communications Fraud Control Association, Fraud Loss Survey, www.cfca.org/fraudlosssurvey/