Check and Signature Fraud Prevention – Challenges and Resolutions due to the increased volume of lower dollar checks and higher quality forgeries, many pass through a visual review undetected. Consequently, as the need to guarantee the authenticity of each document remains urgent, this task requires more efficient, controlled and reliable methods of signature verification. Until recently, proposed technology for automated off-line signature verification did not offer an industrially mature solution, which was at least on par with visual verification. Today, state-of-the-art automated signature verification is a technology that can be easily adapted and efficiently applied to a financial institution’s needs to detect and prevent fraud, regardless of the organization’s type and size. The most advanced systems reveal all types of signature fraud, including random and skilled forgery with accuracy rates that far surpasses visual verification. Such systems can contribute significantly to solving many check fraud-related business challenges faced by banks and other financial institutions. Benefits of automated signature verification include: • The ability to process the images of checks, along with image replacement documents (IRDs), quickly and efficiently to identify suspicious signatures on a broader stream of images. These solutions allow financial institutions to lower the amount threshold for verified checks or inspect all checks instead of looking just at high-dollar items. • The ability to reduce the number of false positive answers, i.e. the system accepting fraudulent signatures as genuine. • Adaptability to existing environments and the ability to integrate with other fraud detection systems to create a centralized application that serves unique business needs. • The opportunity to further improve customer service and satisfaction, enabling financial institutions to proactively inform customers, not only about potential fraud, but also about missing signatures, dates or other important information. Automatic Signature Verification | How it Works Automated signature verification systems leverage the most state-of-the art artificial intelligence technology and the most comprehensive and advanced methods. In such systems, automatic comparison is executed by a powerful combination of verifiers using multiple, fundamentally different algorithms and techniques. In particular, they combine a human-like holistic analysis of a signature and its segmentation with a subsequent analysis of the signature’s elements using geometrical analysis, an analytical method based on signature segmentation and finding correlations between the fragments of reference and suspect signatures, dozens of neural networks and many other innovative techniques. The whole verification process can be described as the work of a group of highly-skilled experts. Each of them has a favorite approach, which is especially efficient in specific cases and “good enough” in others. Additionally, each of them has a special area of expertise, which may be viewed as the distinctive characteristic of a particular verifier. When they are combined, their areas of expertise complement each other to result in excellent performance. Similarly, all signature verifiers apply various approaches to analyze dozens of a signature’s characteristics. 6273 Monarch Park Place, Longmont, CO 80503 USA | T: 303.381.3100 toll free: 888.225.0169 parascript.com 4 | F: 303.381.3101 [email protected]