SignCheck
Although the rate of online banking is increasing hundreds of billions of checks are written every year throughout the world. The affinity to checks is not diminishing in the "check countries". Some trivia about check usage:
Richard Oliver, executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Federal Reserve Banks’ product manager for retail payments: “With around 33 billion checks written in 2006, we expect checks to be around for some time.” For financial institutions worldwide, check processing and clearing is a significant cost factor in the payment process. However, reduction in processing costs leads to higher check fraud risk exposure. Check fraud is consistently rising year-over-year and is expected to continue rising as fraud perpetration using other payment instruments such as credit cards becomes increasingly difficult.
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The use of checks as a vehicle for fraudulent transactions is a global phenomena. The figures about check fraud worldwide are impressive. However only a few organizations are publishing figures about fraud cases and money lost due to check fraud.
- In the 2009 report about payment fraud of the Association for Financial Professionals in the United States figures from 2008 were compared to those from 2004. To cut a long story short: Check fraud is still rising. Plus, also need to face the fact that as long as the economy is in a crisis there is one thing that continues to boom for sure: Fraud. Almost three-quarters of organizations were victims of payments fraud in 2008. Seventy-one percent of organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2008. Nine out of ten organizations (91 percent) that experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2008 were victims of check fraud.
- In Australia the average cheque fraud damage in 2008 was A$ 0.09 in every A$ 100 (up from A$ 0.03 in every A$ 100 in 2005). At total of A$ 14,366,908 was lost to the financial industry in total.
- According to the American Banker's Association check fraud accounted for more than $12.2 billion in 2006 (up from 5.5 billion in 2003 and $4.3 billion in 2001). Check fraud losses incurred in 80 per cent of the banks (up from 75 percent in 2003). The next report with figures from 2008 is likely to be released end of 2009.
- According to French police reports, check fraud cases have increased by 85% between August 2005 and July 2006 in Paris alone.
- In the UK, check fraud attempts increased by 20% between 2003 and 2004 to a total of £665 million in potential fraud losses. Unfortunately no newer figures have been published so far.
SignCheck® closes the last gap in the automation of payment processing with automatic signature and check stock verification that offers unparalleled levels of reliability. Unlike visual verification, automatic signature and check stock verification is reliable, accurate and scalable.
SignCheck® incorporates analytical knowledge from a team of highly-sophisticated forensic writing experts. Their experience was reflected in the training of the neural network and the fuzzy logic in SignCheck®. Fraud Specialists are able to focus on questionable items only, eliminating traditional “needle in a hay stack” analysis. Verification thresholds can be lowered to high fraud areas to optimize fraud detection.
Results of all workflow processes are stored in a result file and may be directly used by other systems processing (storage in payment image archives, merging with debiting checks).
- SOFTPRO's customers process most of their transaction items automatically, thanks to ongoing optimization of reference data, forms and the workflow itself.
- SignCheck® is scalable to process almost any number of transactions within a given operating window. Scalability is achieved through the addition of hardware and no code changes are required.
- SignCheck® provides audit security to meet Basel II requirements: Verification results are completely documented and may be reproduced at any time.
SignCheck® extracts and weighs 60 different primary and 500 secondary static signature characteristics and combines them in parameter vectors. After calculation, a neural network is used to define the level of similarity between a signature and a reference. The natural variation of a signature is taken into account throughout the comparison.
Check value may be used to set thresholds for verification. These settings may be adjusted daily, depending on changing security requirements.
SignCheck® has proven its technological leadership in independent vendor tests with impressive results. Recently, SignCheck ® successfully passed a qualification test held by key financial institutions in the United States and was ranked best in its class.
Since the parameters of workflow and verification procedures can be configured and customized, and because SignCheck® supports multiple banks, it is the perfect fit for both insourcing and outsourcing scenarios. This gives you the flexibility to adapt quickly to eventual business changes.
The first version of SignCheck® premiered in 1994 at Credit Suisse. Today many banks world wide are using this SignPlus® module including Barclays, Citigroup, Discover Financial, HypoVereinsbank, JPMorgan Chase and OCBC (>> SOFTPRO Customers). Millions of checks and transaction documents are verified automatically each working day (>> SOFTPRO Facts & Figures).
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Description about SignCheck video will open on click on screenshot |
Short educational video about the idea of capturing signature variants for enhancement of the workflow process video will open on click on screenshot |
Downloads
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| Automatic Verification of Signatures and Signing Rules |