Industry Focus: Combatting Fraud with Robotics and SMS

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables organisations to automate repetitive decisioning tasks and deliver greatly enhanced user experiences and outcomes.

“Aimed at increasing operational capacity and improve efficiency, RPA enables automation of repetitive, rules-based processes by emulating human execution. Key to RPA are “bots”—software programs designed to enable process efficiencies.”

FEI: Fraud and Emerging Tech

RPA can be used across a wide range of situations however in this article we will focus primarily on fraud which is a key issue for banking and public sector institutions.

Fraud, Robotics and SMS

Process automation has been moving at a rapid pace in recent years, with financial institutions leading the way as they respond to ever-increasing incidences of cyber attacks on their customers as well as other scenarios that involve automated decisioning.

RPA can intersect with SMS to deliver highly effective automated alerts and interactive services. With its immediacy and impact, SMS continues to shine in the financial services sector as a means to contact customers about fraud or other account-related information. Recent smishing attacks have only highlighted how SMS can be used to rapidly warn customers not to click a fraudulent message.

Using an API for fraud alerts is a big leap forward from doing “batch and blast” SMS as it saves a lot of effort and man hours in setting up messages manually. Instead, you can send SMS dynamically based on RPA triggers set up in your core application.

Permanent tsb and RPA

Alerts can be sent immediately after a suspicious transaction has taken place based on automated decisioning. Our recent customer success story with Permanent tsb showcases how SMS APIs can be successfully combined with RPA in order to analyse and respond to real-time situations.

“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”.

Eileen Carroll, Púca CEO

The Permanent tsb Fraud department has combined robotics decisioning with Púca’s SMS API to deliver an enhanced customer experience and reduce fraud incidents. They are also benefiting from efficiencies in time and cost savings from reduced manual data and call handling.

“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

Anti-Smishing

Púca is an active member of the MEF Trust in Enterprise Messaging programme which aims to accelerate market clean-up and help educate business messaging solution buyers about the threats of fraudulent practices. The MEF’s Sender ID registration programme has been rolled out in Ireland and the UK and is of particular relevance to finance and public sector organisations doing large scale SMS messaging who wish to mitigate against future smishing attacks.

Handling RPA Notifications at scale

Businesses looking to introduce any degree of automation to their SMS communication flows need a reliable API from a reputable SMS gateway provider, ideally one that offers direct operator connections in their local market.

Púca’s Impower™ API is ideal for robotic notifications as it follows HTTP and REST standards that are developer-friendly and broadly understood. It is easily accessed and fully documented in our developer portal.

To request more information contact about our SMS API and reporting console please contact us.