IBM Fights Fraud with New Software
December 4, 2012 Alex Woodie
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IBM last week launched a new release of i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, its Windows-based software application that’s designed to help organizations discover, fight, and prevent fraud. The new release brings a new architecture that should improve scalability and data integration. It can be very difficult to detect fraud, especially when it’s being perpetrated by small groups of highly skilled and motivated people against large organizations that have rigid processes and are slow to react. With i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis, IBM hopes to give these large organizations a leg up on the game by giving them powerful tools designed to peer into all areas of the organization susceptible to abuse. “If you cannot see the full picture, you cannot respond,” is IBM’s tagline for the product. We’re still (hopefully) decades away from developing applications that are all-seeing and all-knowing (Hal 9000 meets Skynet). There hasn’t been some kind of computational breakthrough that’s only available to corporations and not criminals. In place of software like that, IBM with i2 Fraud does the hard work of poring through vast amounts of disparate data to detect traces of fraud occurring across multiple channels. When the analysis has been run and the various events, people, and objects have been “joined up,” i2 then presents its findings through meaningful visualizations, dashboards, and reports. Enabling collaboration among the various stakeholders involved–those in roles such as executives, administrators, and internal and external auditors and investigators–is another key aspect of this software. With i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis version 1.0.5, IBM has moved the product to a service oriented architecture (SOA) that improves scalability, data integration and ingestion, and search capabilities. In particular, this brings IBM a new “analyst driven” data ingestion method for i2 Fraud. An SOA foundation also provides access to data in other applications, such as IBM’s SPSS fraud detection software or IBM Case Manager, through an enterprise service bus (ESB). IBM has also introduced two new roles within i2 Fraud. The new analyst role is included in premium versions of the software, and has the capability to create charts from a Windows client interface, while the new investigator role is available with standard versions of the software, and delivers access to the i2 Fraud repository through a Web browser. IBM also unveiled updates to its broader i2 Intelligence Analysis line of products, which are designed to help organizations analyze large amounts of disparate data, although not specifically with the goal of uncovering fraud. For more information on i2 Fraud Intelligence Analysis version 1.0.5, which shipped on November 30, see IBM United States Software Announcement 212-440. RELATED STORY A Big Data Hungry IBM Buys i2 and Algorithmics
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