NatWest has partnered with Featurespace, a provider of enterprise financial crime prevention software, to protect its customers from push payments fraud.

The UK banking giant has selected Featurespace’s ARIC Risk Hub to protect its customers against Authorised Push Payments (APP) fraud and scams.

ARIC Risk Hub is powered by adaptive behavioural analytics (ABA) and uses machine learning models to protect customers.

It allows financial institutions to monitor individual behavioural activity in real-time and identify fraud increasingly.

It does this by allowing firms to set up suspicious activity alerts, while mitigating the number of genuine transactions declined.

Featurespace CEO Martina King said: “NatWest demonstrates an unwavering commitment to overcoming fraud and financial crime across its business. We are excited to be their partner and to continue our journey together.”

NatWest already completed an enterprise-wide deployment of ARIC Risk Hub earlier this year after partnering with Featurespace in 2019.

It did this to detect anomalies and collate account-level data across all touch points to protect customers in real-time.

The lender identified the increase in the value of fraud and scams detected after 24 hours of deploying the solution, while the false positive rates decreased immediately.

NatWest head of fraud prevention and response Alasdair MacFarlane said: “As we facilitate greater control over the access and movement of money for customers, our systems must be able to instantly determine if activity is genuine so that the high level of convenience is matched by uncompromising security standards.

“In our continued efforts to optimise our fraud and risk strategies, ARIC Risk Hub’s ability allows us to adapt to and detect new fraud and suspicious activity in real time.”

Last month, NatWest partnered with Malwarebytes to offer premium cybersecurity security solutions to all its consumer and business banking customers globally.