CFXWorks and Subuno Team Up to Fight Credit Card Fraud

Published: February 28, 2012

by Alex Woodie

CFXWorks and Subuno have integrated their respective products to develop a secure credit card processing solution for the IBM i server and other platforms. The integration, which includes fraud detection software from Subuno and payment software from CFXWorks, allows merchants to automatically screen card transactions for potential fraud before submitting them across the payment network.

CFXWorks has a long history of developing card solutions for the IBM i server, and has more than 100 clients running its payment gateway software on the esteemed platform. The company's flagship product is NovaXpress 400, while its CreditCardXpress offering is a version of NovaXpress that has been adapted to run on Windows, Linux, and Unix.

Subuno develops a fraud screening solution that runs in the cloud. The software takes card requests from merchants, runs details of a transaction through one or more third-party database services, and then determines whether or not the transaction is likely to be fraudulent.

Basically Subuno is an aggregator of commercial and free fraud prevention solutions. Examples of the types of third-party services Subuno can access include:

• MaxMind's GeoIP, which tells the merchant what geographic region the transaction is originating from;
• MaxMind's miniFraud, a fraud detection network consisting of 6,000 e-commerce retailers;
• the BIN, or Bank Identification Number, database, which lets the merchant look up information such as the name of the issuing bank card type, card brand, and card level;
• TeleSign's PhoneID, which detects suspicious phone numbers that are highly conducive to fraud, such as pre-paid mobile and VoIP lines;
• and Rapleaf, an online service that lets merchants check on customers' reputations.

None of these fraud-detection services are foolproof, but taken as a whole a merchant can get a fairly good idea of the likelihood that a given transaction will turn out to be fraudulent using this software.

What's unique about the integration between CFXWorks and Subuno is the work the companies have done to ensure smooth operation in IBM i environments. According to the vendors, RPG programmers can access Subuno's services in one of two ways, including through a Web services interface developed by CFXWorks, or through data queues.

"CFXWorks has extended our services and made it very easy to use by existing CreditCardXpress merchants as well as companies using IBM's iSeries platform," stated Subuno co-founder Ed Lin in a press release. "We look forward to working with thousands of merchants that can benefit from this partnership and helping them address the issue of credit card fraud."

Credit card fraud is a huge and growing problem. According to a 2009 Lexis Nexus study, credit card fraud accounts for $190 billion in total annual costs, with merchants and banks taking the biggest hits. Other studies peg the direct losses at between $3 billion and $9 billion annually.

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