FiVerity and Fortanix: Helping Financial Institutions Fight Back Against Digital Fraud

greg woolf fortanix
Greg Woolf
Published:Apr 19, 2022
Reading Time:3 Minutes

Growing in the digital space can be tricky for financial institutions. Banks must vet new account applicants to identify potential fraud, while at the same time safeguarding sensitive customer information in the process.

Although there are many use cases for Confidential Computing in financial services, firms are yet to fully realize how this revolutionary technology can be applied to protect sensitive data.

We believe securing data in use will have an outsized impact to prevent digital fraud. We are excited to partner with Fortanix to incorporate Confidential Computing into our digital fraud platform to help financial institutions grow confidently and securely.

Why Confidential Computing Will Transform Digital Fraud Detection

Fraudsters are especially active during times of uncertainty, and the pandemic provided the perfect opportunity for change. Financial institutions were forced to accelerate their plans for digital transformation and implement new technologies and processes to give consumers greater online access.

Financial institutions who successfully transitioned to digital services experienced massive growth from online-only applications, but the fraudsters also took advantage - identity theft alone cost U.S. banks $721 billion in 2021.

We’re seeing fraudsters harness increasingly sophisticated approaches like combining fraud-related theft with cyber tactics. Fraudsters use AI to outsmart legacy fraud detection solutions, and automation to operate their criminal organizations at scale.

To help financial institutions grow their customer base more securely, we believe these Confidential Computing use cases will have the greatest impact:

  1. Providing access to a range of fraud-detection algorithms and solutions: Collaboration is the most effective way to fight fraud. Banks that use on-premises solutions lose out on shared intelligence like collaborative learning models and other advances in the digital fraud prevention.

  2. Sharing intel on fraudsters: Although the rate of digital fraud has risen sharply in recent years, financial institutions are still reluctant to share information about fraudulent activity with each other. Their primary fears are (a) customer information falling into the wrong hands and (b) giving competitors access to sensitive data.

FiVerity uses Confidential Computing to address these issues. By providing models which analyze encrypted data from multiple banks, FiVerity identifies patterns of fraudulent activity with a much higher degree of accuracy – without the risk of decryption or data breach.

For banks that have been hesitant to allow any sensitive data off-premises, Confidential Computing provides assurances that their data is fully protected. Unlike encryption technologies that leave data vulnerable within memory, Intel®’s SGX technology delivers confidential computing through a protected execution environment with a direct interface to the hardware, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive customer information.

FiVerity is using Confidential Computing to enable the secure and anonymous sharing of sensitive data about fraudulent activity. Financial institutions using our Digital Fraud Network share information “anonymously,” and only receive alerts on fraudsters that are present in their portfolio.

How FiVerity is Harnessing Fortanix Technology

It would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for FiVerity to create an application that uses the specialized programming and coding necessary to leverage Intel SGX on Microsoft Azure.

Thanks to Fortanix, we provide Confidential Computing to our customers without having to change our coding language or processes.

Fortanix seamlessly converted our application to work in Confidential Computing environments, so we did not rewrite any code, making it possible for us to run our existing application in a secure enclave in minutes.

The financial industry can now benefit from a range of Confidential Computing solutions without the need for additional development or integration costs.

FiVerity and Fortanix – A Collaborative Partnership

We recognize that Confidential Computing is a collaborative initiative and that’s something that is at the very heart of both FiVerity and Fortanix.

Our companies share a belief that collaboration is key to changing the world. Taking a look at the caliber of companies Fortanix is already partnering with gives us confidence that we will achieve great things together.

Thanks to Fortanix and Intel SGX, we’re able to bring powerful, secure, Confidential Computing technology to our customers to help them grow safely by signing up legitimate customers without fear of fraud.

How Fortanix helps with Digital Fraud prevention 

Securing identities is critical to prevent digital fraud. With increased digital banking this is an important requirement for new age banks. Fortanix solution offers- 

- Confidential Computing technology powered analytics for digital Fraud detection and prevention. 

- Tokenization and data masking capabilities for securing PII. (download tokenization whitepaper)

- End-to-end security for keys and data (at-rest, in-transit, and in-use) protected with layers of defense including Confidential Computing Technology powered on Intel® SGX and FIPS 140-2 L3 validation; Only authorized users can access keys. 

Our integrated platform, called Data Security Manager (DSM), is DevOps/SecOps friendly, easy to use, and enables customers to centrally implement and manage multiple data security capabilities from a single pane of glass. Primarily delivered as a SaaS offering, we also provide on-prem, software and virtual deployment options. 

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