Permanent tsb: 2-way fraud alerts

Behind the Permanent tsb Fraud Monitoring System is a team working 24/7 and alerting customers in real time to potentially suspicious transactions.

In 2018 the Permanent tsb Fraud department tasked Púca with delivering an SMS communication platform for their Fraud team that supported multiple users; enabling users to be added and removed as required as well as providing a full audit trail of all SMS sent to customers.

Another challenge was to reduce the large volume of inbound and outbound calls that were being made to and from the department, especially when there were industry-wide increases of phishing/smishing incidents in circulation.

Púca developed a multi-user version of their Impower messaging product with tiered multi-user access, advanced password management, and 2-factor authentication using Google Authenticator for added security.

“The initial big win of the project was the user management: we could onboard or offboard Fraud team members really quickly, and training was minimal due to the usability of the Impower platform.”
Dave Byrne, Fraud Manager, Permanent tsb

Initially all the texts being sent were all set up by the Fraud Team themselves using the console which was still somewhat manual. Púca provisioned a 2-ways SMS API, however, the information required from the core mainframe still had to be retrieved and constructed manually in order to call the API, leading to a higher risk of manual error.

This is where the Automation Centre of Excellence at Group Operations helped to close the gap, providing a Robotics Process solution that automatically gathers information, runs a SIM swap check, and alerts customers of the bank. This was launched in 2021 and now customers can respond immediately to the SMS alert with a simple “Y” or “N” to confirm whether or not the transaction should be treated as fraudulent which greatly reduces call volumes.

Overall the project has resulted in an enhanced customer journey for both genuine transaction confirmation and fraudulent activity confirmation.

As many as 60% of customers are responding immediately (within an agreed response time) to the automated fraud alerts, which means the Fraud department at Permanent tsb have drastically reduced the number of customer calls both inbound and outbound.

“Púca’s API and 2-way SMS functionality is working really well with our automated robotic process and we’re seeing a massive benefit so far even in these early days. The collaboration with Púca has had a big impact on how we manage our customer contact process. Our customer journey has been positively impacted and we’re delighted with the results”
Dave Byrne, Fraud Manager, Permanent tsb

Púca MD Eileen Carroll adds

“Permanent tsb are very forward thinking and agile in how they do things, and they adapt quickly to protect their customers. The results of this project are testament to the continued usefulness of SMS as an A2P channel especially when combined with other platforms and technologies”.