Experian launches fraud prevention service for India

Experian, the global information services company, today announced the launch of Hunter, India’s first fraud prevention service that enables local and international businesses to prevent costly application fraud. Application fraud is a growing global epidemic and it occurs when fraudsters – often organised criminals - use another person’s identity to apply for finance they are not entitled to, or when genuine individuals misrepresent their own information in an attempt to obtain financial services they are not entitled to. 

Hunter – which is used by over 100+ major institutions around the world to combat fraud – is now available to Indian financial institutions and Axis Bank and ICICI Bank have already signed up to the hosted and pay-as-you-use service. 

Representing a first for India, Experian’s Hunter service enables the early detection of potentially fraudulent applications and helps identify fraud rings. The most effective strategy is to prevent the fraud at the point of application and Hunter achieves this without affecting customer service levels and turn around times. Of significant benefit, Hunter’s hosted technology means that Indian businesses can access the service quickly and easily to enhance their defences against application fraud. 

Sisir Chakrabarti, Deputy Managing Director, Axis Bank said, “Experian Hunter will enable us to create a continuous cycle of fraud prevention, detection, investigation and improvement. We believe that Hunter will provide a unique platform for all banks to collaborate on a non-competing topic such as fraud prevention and hence we have agreed to be the founder members of the Experian Hunter Closed User Group.” 

Rajiv Sabharwal, Executive Director, ICICI Bank said, “With growing sophistication of fraudsters in creating false documents, it becomes imperative for banks to collaborate and bring in technology solutions that would significantly enhance fraud detection capabilities. The Experian Hunter service offered in a hosted model will enable ICICI Bank to detect inconsistencies in applicant information and is expected to help create a better quality portfolio.” 

Globally, application frauds substantially impact bad debt provisions/write-offs and profitability. While many of the application fraud related losses get camouflaged within bad debt provisions/write-offs, the Reserve Bank of India has reported 24,572 instances of all types of frauds of a value less than '1Crore amounting to a total loss of '493Crore and 225 instances of large ticket frauds causing a loss of '1,524Crore, to the banking sector in FY 2009-2010. The number of fraud cases reported in India has almost doubled in the last 5 years, highlighting the serious threat fraud poses to the economy. 

“Hunter is another leading global Experian product for India and it complements our Credit Information Services in the country. This ground-breaking new service will allow financial institutions to better manage the risk and reward of their commercial decisions. We have conducted Proofs of Concept at many leading public and private sector banks and the results have been extremely encouraging and present a compelling return on investment. Hunter is just is one of the many globally proven value added products that we are launching in India,” said Vikram Narayan, Managing Director and Country Manager for Experian in India.