Design a credit card fraud-detection system.

Credit card are now days fondly called plastic money and are used in various avenues such as online shopping apart from the regular pay at merchant/physical store

Clarifying questions

-          Who are we? There are major players such as visa, master etc à You are product manager at Visa

-          While we plan to scale the solution, can I assume that right now we can only target India as a geography à Yes

-           Any specific kind of fraud that you are interested in à copy card, store details, etc à You can decide on your own

Product vision

To reduce the credit-card fraud

User segment

1.       Customers using card at physical store

a.       For big ticket the vendor/shop owner can ask for identification

2.       Shopping/payment at online portal

a.       Mostly the security lies in the hand of customer

3.       Customers at ATMs

a.       Scammers can target these places

The biggest user segment that we can improve is the customers doing online payments. The chances of physical validation and cyber fraud increases multifold

Pain-points

-          Reactive reaction once fraud is committed

o   This is usually the bigger amount

o   The areas of caution are breached

-          It goes un-detected

o   It could be small ticket

-          Tedious resolution after fraud

o   Usually this goes through various governance processes

The most obvious and high impact pain-point comes out to be Proactive fraud detection

Solutions

As we delve into solutions there are various CX aspects that we have to look into such that there is a fine balance between proactive fraud detection and hampering the customer experience by increasing the customer efforts

1.       Notifications [ Impact – High, effort – high, CX – mildly lower]

a.       Detect suspicious transactions

b.       Parameters such as IP, location, unusual amount

c.       Send an alert at phone similar to what Amazon does for logging

d.       For bigger amount always ask for permission

e.       For quick and recurring amount approval is required

2.       Blocking [Impact – medium to high, effort – high, CX – Low]

a.       Block card for few minutes to few hours

b.       AI/ML engine

                                                               i.      Figure out the fraud pattern

                                                             ii.      Confidence of 98% or more that not fraud then proceed

3.       Dynamic Multifactor authentication [Impact – Medium , Effort – medium, CX – mildly lower]

a.       Ask for duly authentication such as pin and credit card

b.       It could be mix of email OTP and card

c.       Phone Otp and card  

As I think the user is one part of fraud and somehow the foul entity is trying to take a control of the credit card. But there is another party

For eg: Fraudulent website or payment gateway, which is created a sole purpose to fraud

If I have to quickly think on it – A quick solution that comes to my mind is visa partnering with google or other vendor to scan the authenticity of this website/gateway and notify users then and there

-          Considering the effort, impact, and CX perspective, I am leaning towards notifications feature

Key metrics to measure

1.       No of active transactions vis-à-vis past few quarter data

2.       Notifications reviewed

Guardrail metrics

1.       False positives