The customer

AmBank (M) Berhad (AmBank) is the retail arm of the 6th largest banking groups in Malaysia, AMMB Holdings Bhd (AmBank Group), and has been in the market for over 43 years. It offers a wide range of financial products and services focused on retail customers and preferred segments in the small business, SME, and corporate sectors. AmBank prioritizes and safeguards digital safety of Malaysian consumers transacting online with GBG’s digital risk management platform.

The challenge

Towards the end of 2019, AmBank has successfully accelerated the growth of its digital banking services – AmOnline and eFlex@AmOnline, and mobile payment offerings – DuitNow and JomPAY, bringing digital transactions to 75% of their total transactions. Its AmOnline internet & mobile banking platform saw a 50% year-on-year increase of users and recorded a 48% increase in online transactions.

On the regulatory front, Malaysia Central Bank Negara has passed the policy for Risk Management in Technology effective on 1 Jan 2020, which all Malaysia-based Financial Institutions (FIs) including AmBank has to adhere. The guideline aims to address the increasing threat of cyber-attacks by formalising the development of consistent enterprise-wide risk management programs to manage technology and business related risks, and enhance technology resiliency in all Malaysian financial institutions.

AmBank’s goal is to realize its vision of a centralized enterprise fraud protection system to manage a cross channel system supporting their full digital services for fraud management and endpoint threat protection. This would cater to all of its retail banking products from basic bank transfers (checking and savings accounts), credit card transactions to mortgages, personal loans, and fix deposits, to corporate banking services.

“AmBank chose GBG’s Predator and SecureBank solution suite as it provides us with augmented fraud check and detection against first party fraud and endpoint threats. Other solutions were unable to offer an end-to-end enterprise fraud solution to achieve data convergence across cyber, fraud and compliance silos. Since deploying GBG’s solution in Dec2019, AmBank has prevented more than RM$2.7 million potential fraud exposure in digital fraud transactions on AmOnline.”

Yeoh Eng Leong,
Senior VP of Retail Banking Fraud Management, AmBank (M) Berhad

The solution

AmBank engaged GBG in 2018 to implement Instinct for its retail banking digital onboarding fraud management and mitigated RM$22 million in potential application fraud exposure in 2019. As a result, the bank evaluated GBG’s Predator and SecureBank solution suite to ascertain the capability to meet their end-to-end enterprise fraud management platform requirements.

GBG’s Predator transaction monitoring fraud solution detects suspicious activities, alerts and stops fraudulent monetary exchanges on AmBank’s high-volume of continuous transactions and payments. With GBG’s SecureBank endpoint threat detection, the solution provides augmented fraud check and detection from scams and money mules, to cyber threats including bots, malware and high-risk devices. A wide range of transactions is now continuously monitored to detect bad actors:

• Fund transfer, balance transfer, quick cash, bill pay, Jom pay, telegraphic transfer
• All payments within bank, intrabank and internationally
• All account types including Savings account, current account, Mastercard/ Visa, housing loan, hire purchase
• Profile and alert to suspicious online banking activity (account takeover, man in the browser, malware)

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The outcome

In line with the bank’s objective to accelerate its digital channel growth and service expansion, GBG’s solution enables AmBank to easily and quickly add new digital products and channels for instant fraud and endpoint threat protection. The solution’s dynamic channel modification model allows AmBank to add any new channels including credit card, mobile devices, and contactless payment for instant financial crime protection. The comprehensive system can afterwards be rolled out across the bank’s digital channels and product types quickly, to provide enhanced digital fraud risk protection and security to AmBank’s consumers transacting using their range of online banking solutions. Just in 2019, 11,308 scam cases with an average of 31 per day are observed.

“From the beginning, we are confident of GBG’s capability to engineer an enterprise solution that not only fits our requirements but in compliance with the Malaysian government’s regulations. Indeed, the project team demonstrated a clear understanding on our local regulatory framework and further provided recommendations for AmBank to improve our operation to be on par with global standards.”

Yeoh Eng Leong,
Senior VP of Retail Banking Fraud Management, AmBank (M) Berhad

Overall, the GBG Predator and SecureBank suite has improved the bank’s core competence in detecting unusual transaction patterns and endpoint threats including malware, bot detection, phishing, social engineering attacks, as well as anomalies in geolocation, device fingerprint, user biometric behaviour and customer and account profiling, to facilitate multi-channel data analysis and faster detection and mitigation. The bank is now able to effectively and efficiently improve detection of high-risk devices, online access and transactions resulting in reduction of fraud losses and preventing financial crime whilst providing a safer and secure way for their digital banking customers to conduct self-service banking with trust.

In addition, the solution suite has enabled AmBank to bridge system silos and share data intelligently across different channels with its end-to-end digital integration, which satisfies their requirement to detect modern, emerging and complex fraud scenarios.

With GBG’s solution suite in place, AmBank is seeing higher accuracy in fraud detection with legitimate false positive of less than 4%. AmBank’s customer satisfaction score has also increased to 72%, an 11%* YoY growth, to further affirmed the strengthening of digital trust and seamless online transaction experience between the bank and their customers.

Yeoh adds, “Though the end-to-end implementation was extensive, GBG is timely in completing the project. The experience working with GBG has been highly satisfactory – the local business and support teams are very experienced and well versed with local regulatory needs to make this project a success. We are looking forward to working with GBG beyond the current deployments.”

With a new end-to-end digital risk management platform in place, AmBank is now more confident as it focuses on accelerating its digital agenda, introducing new channels, products and look to expand its market beyond Malaysia, while providing a safer and secure way for AmBank banking customers to conduct their self-service banking with ease of mind.

*Comparing AmBank’s customer satisfaction score in the same time period between December 2018 – March 2019 and December 2019 to March 2020.