Skip to main content

PULSE and FICO Collaborate on Next-Gen Upgrade for DebitProtect®

By now you may have seen the news that PULSE has adopted the FICO® Falcon® Platform to provide an enhanced foundation for PULSE’s DebitProtect® fraud-mitigation service. The collaboration was announced at FICO World in early November.

Since it was first rolled out in 2007, DebitProtect has been helping PULSE issuer participants address a problem that is consistently rated among their top concerns. The rapidly changing nature of debit card fraud makes it a constant challenge and it grows more complex every day.

PULSE DebitProtect Standard Service provides fraud alerts for all issuer participants. For those that want a higher level of defense, DebitProtect Authorization Blocking provides a comprehensive fraud prevention capability that uses predictive artificial intelligence and machine learning transaction scoring. Additionally, issuers can use rule-based strategies to identify and stop fraud threats. Both services now use the same state-of-the-art FICO Falcon platform.

Multi-Year Effort

In 2018, DebitProtect detected an estimated $120 million in suspected fraud. However, by that point PULSE was already in the final stages of a multi-year effort to upgrade the service.

“Our team had already been working on debit fraud for over a decade, and we had our own ideas and an aggressive roadmap, so we liked the fact that FICO had an equally aggressive roadmap,” said Dave Schneider in his presentation, at FICO World.

PULSE’s fraud-mitigation services represent a powerful combination of PULSE fraud analysts, technology and network insights, helping participants reduce risk exposure with minimal disruption to cardholders. How valuable is it? Four out of five respondents to our most recent Voice of the Client survey indicated that DebitProtect is a reason for continued participation in PULSE.

Reimagining DebitProtect

“Our focus as we reimagined DebitProtect was on how we could deliver maximum value to our clients, and we learned a lot about client pain points, needs and priorities through our Voice of the Client survey,” Schneider said. “Based on client input, we focused on speeding up response times and improving the customer experience.”

To date, PULSE has boarded nearly 3,000 PULSE-participating issuers onto the upgraded platform. Issuers can now implement emergency rules in real-time by writing their own self-service rules. Additionally, issuers can now upload a file of confirmed fraud and have it tagged automatically in the system, rather than having to manually mark fraudulent transactions. Issuers also can upload updated card-compromise lists in real-time for use by DebitProtect rules.

The early results have been outstanding. PULSE participants are stopping more fraud and impacting fewer valid transactions. To date, DebitProtect with FICO Falcon has registered a 30% improvement in blocked fraud, a 40% improvement in Value Detection Rate, which is an indicator of the percentage of fraudulent cards identified, and a 25% improvement in the overall False Positive Ratio.

Additional Enhancement in the Works

These enhancements promise to be just the beginning of the value PULSE will get from the upgraded service. We are continuing to assess additional potential enhancements, including looking at anomalies from all sides of a transaction.

This much is certain, debit fraud will continue to evolve, which means PULSE will continue to explore new ways DebitProtect can meet the changing needs of our participants.