PULSE and FICO Extend Partnership to Deliver Fraud-Detection Technology

PULSE, a Discover company, has extended its partnership with FICO to deliver fraud-detection technology to financial institutions.

This collaboration permits PULSE’s continued enhancements of its DebitProtect suite of fraud-mitigation solutions, which are powered by FICO’s Falcon Fraud Manager and use learnings from its network of participating financial institutions, PULSE said in a Wednesday (Aug. 9) press release.

“Extending our close partnership with FICO enables us to continue enhancing our ability to prevent and respond to the latest trends in debit fraud,” PULSE Executive Vice President of Operations Jim Lerdal said in the release.

PULSE has deployed FICO’s latest fraud model, which separates card-not-present transactions from card-present ones, provides enhanced scoring and improves the network’s ability to identify fraudulent transactions in card-not-present channels, according to the press release.

The enhanced fraud-detection and blocking capabilities have become even more important with the Federal Reserve’s Regulation II clarification, Lerdal said in the release. With these rules, more card-not-present transaction volume is expected to shift to unaffiliated debit networks such as PULSE.

FICO Vice President of Fraud Adam Davies said in the release: “Our Falcon Fraud Manager model benefits from the fraud learnings fed into it from PULSE’s large network of debit card issuers. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with PULSE to protect all debit stakeholders.”

Debit has consistently been consumers’ preferred form of payments, PULSE President David Schneider told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in February.

Debit transactions will continue to be among the most durable payments out there, especially in omnichannel commerce, through at least the next three to five years, Schneider said at the time.

“Consumer behavior has a tendency to be very durable,” Schneider said.

PULSE’s partner, FICO, has added collaborations and capabilities in recent months.

In May, FICO partnered with Teradata to develop artificial intelligence-powered decision management solutions. The first solutions will focus on real-time payments fraud, insurance claims and supply chain optimization.

During the same month, FICO added transactional analytics to its applied intelligence platform to help enterprises better understand their customers. These new capabilities provide real-time intelligence, data aggregation, profiling and feature management.