Modernizing payment operations with trusted data

Modernizing payment operations builds confidence with trusted data

The financial sector is built on trust. Consumers depend on banks and credit unions to keep accounts, payments, and wire transfers secure. When unauthorized transactions or payments occur, consumer trust erodes and credit unions and banks are at risk of losing clientele. Moreover, regulators seek to effectively manage money movement as the flow of money impacts growth, financial sector success, and economic stability. 

Digital payment operations support regulatory and compliance demands for improving transparency and real-time detection. Analytics and data platforms create opportunities to further leverage data beyond individual payment or transaction activity. Greater transparency of payments will lead to fewer fraudulent transactions and increase financial sector confidence.

“Having payment insights and data in a cloud analytics and data platform allows us to look at payments overall—not just for a specific credit union, but for all credit unions we serve—which creates a better chance to detect fraudulent activity,” El-Kays highlights. “Rather than doing analytics on a few thousand transactions, analytics can be done on millions of transactions because the size of the data will grow significantly, allowing for better detection.”

With these insights into payments, PPJV spans many credit unions—rather than siloed insights into one credit union—providing greater transparency into potential fraud. 

Ethical use of data powers trusted AI innovation

With the cloud analytics and data platform in place, PPJV is turning its attention to innovating in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI. Natural language processing brings opportunities for credit unions to more easily query their data without having advanced analytics skills.

“We’re looking at the ability to use plain language to query Teradata’s Financial Services Data Model and the analytics database. Those clients that are small and might not have the technical ability to do analytics using traditional tools, like SQL, Python, or R, will be able to do the analytics by querying their data using natural language processing,” highlights El-Kays.

El-Kays says the ethical use of data is a crucial component of trusted AI, particularly when managing client payments and transfers.

“We must ensure that the models are used ethically. AI/ML models are intended to serve our clients and their clients—not any other purposes. We need to explain and validate results produced from the models to ensure they are producing the right results,” concludes El-Kays.

By providing the cataloging, data security, data access monitoring, access logging, and data permissions, PPJV gives credit unions confidence in data harmonization and governance for payment processing.

“The credit unions know it’s secure, safe, and trusted,” says El-Kays.

Not only is data governance building trust, but modernized payment platforms also create opportunities for greater insights and transparency into payments. 

“Data-rich payments provide a lot of information around the payer, payee, and accounts. This is all information that previously wasn’t captured. The more information we have, the more insights and analytics can be done,” describes El-Kays.

Moreover, payment transparency and activity-based oversight gives greater insights into transaction behaviors to better detect fraud.

“With activity-based oversight, we can use data to look at the activity of customers transacting. By performing analytics into payment activities, like what the individual does and where they transact, we can identify patterns and other opportunities that feed fraud models. If something is out of the norm, credit unions can trigger fraud alerts—or, better yet, stop the transaction as it’s happening,” explains El-Kays.

VantageCloud on AWS unlocks and empowers data for PPJV’s customers by providing a flexible, accessible, and trusted data platform.

“We looked at some of the capabilities that exist in the marketplace. We need a strong vendor that actually understands the space and knows how to deliver on implementing analytics and data. We considered cost, performance, stability, and capabilities. Ultimately, we decided that VantageCloud would be our best choice,” El-Kays shares.