Product Description

FMT Octopus™ is successfully enabling financial institutions to assess fraud and security risks in real time to prevent online fraud associated with mission critical applications for banking products, financial transactions, customer account servicing, merchant payment processing and beyond.

A leading global research analyst has confirmed that FMT Octopus™ is the only product on the market that is embedded inside the application server (supporting Websphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, Pramati and Jboss). For FMT clients, this means it is installed and working within minutes − without the need for immediate or ongoing IT integration, maintenance or hardware installation dependence. 

This unique integration deployment approach comes without compromising performance to give TRUE real time fraud prevention capability. (It recently analysed 8.4 million decisions per hour in a test conducted at the IBM innovation centre in Sydney.)

This combination of real time performance − together with a range of in-built, multi-factor customer authentication options for banking customers (including One-Time Passwords, Tokens and other challenge/response strategies) − gives financial institutions unparalleled flexibility when implementing desired fraud strategies.

FMT Octopus™ plugs the holes left by firewalls, intrusion detection solutions and various forms of backend, after-event analytics. Without FMT Octopus™, these usual defence mechanisms are being successfully – and globally – exploited by online criminals.

With FMT Octopus™ implemented in a financial institution’s web infrastructure, fraud, risk and information security managers are only limited by their imaginations in creating optimal rules and strategies that can be tested and deployed immediately to defend against 24x7x365 threats.

A simple example: FMT Octopus™ can determine a customer’s activity as “normal” from a frequently used PC or device location. Any deviation from this could be flagged as “higher risk” for a geographically static customer, or “lower risk” for a globe-trotting executive. FMT Octopus™ then actions these risk events in real time for an optimal outcome for customers as well as financial institutions.

FMT Octopus™ retains the integrity of using the internet as an effective channel to conduct business.

Innovation

FMT Octopus™ is at the cutting-edge of software technology with its Pre-Processing Filter (PPF), with a leading global research analyst reporting that FMT is the ONLY provider of this type of product in the market today. Why is the PPF important? This innovation enables ground-breaking implementation, integration and installation for IT, risk, fraud and security operations for any organisations’ web applications and legacy systems.

For the first time, an enterprise-wide solution leverages an organisation’s existing investment in other fraud detection and anti-money laundering systems. For example, a global organisation can protect itself from a criminal’s initial attack on one product – and then immediately defend against the fraudster’s repeat attacks on other products or channels across the company.

FMT Octopus™ has huge global growth potential with its complimentary customer authentication application that can enable millions of customers around the world to use a patent-pending approach to authenticate themselves to different organisations using a single, simple-to-use application residing on their mobile phone or handheld device. This personal authentication can then be used for online banking, shopping, loyalty schemes, etc. It also could be utilised to gain access to their corporate network. The personal verification eliminates the inconvenience of remembering (or forgetting!) numerous passwords or carrying different forms of authentication tokens.

Performance

Very early in the product development cycle, benchmark testing was seen as critical to the success of FMT Octopus™. Since the application integrates tightly with very complex (often clustered) internet applications, factors such as reliability and performance are key product attributes. To ensure robust performance of its core rules engine, FMT conducted tests at IBM’s Innovation Centre in Sydney.

To make certain that technological factors such as inter-transaction locking, waits and memory leaks also were being discovered, FMT decided to push the load for an extended period of time across multiple processors. We selected an IBM 8-way 1.8 Ghz Power 5 system running AIX and augmented the throughput with the help of the FMT Octopus™ inbuilt load balancer.

The test data used a rule set that would be a reasonable representation of what could be used for an internet credit card origination platform.

The resulting throughput (8.4 million decisions per hour) were well beyond our expectations and certainly no credit card issuer in the world has volumes that approach such a load.

The nominated company representative: Bjarne Matzen is FMT’s Chief Technology Officer and has coauthored several IBM redbooks including: “Java and WebSphere Performance on IBM eServer iSeries Servers”. 

Potential

FMT is a niche organisation primarily focussed on delivering FMT Octopus™ as THE solution to combat online banking fraud, which our sales channel partners IBM and LogicaCMG have deemed an immediate problem to solve for the financial services market.

Via discussions with the Reserve Bank of India and VISA Asia Pacific, FMT has determined that the potential to globally exploit this market is enormous – with opportunities in a wide variety of market sectors that can unleash the “blue-sky” potential of FMT Octopus™. The “tentacles” of FMT Octopus™ are capable of reaching far and wide.

Anti-money laundering compliance, insurance, e-retail, e-funds, online auctions, government agencies, network corporate security and credit risk management are all obvious next market steps for our solution – in addition to the huge potential for millions of global internet users to have a single, simple-to-use application residing on their mobile phone or handheld device that can be used privately for online banking, shopping, loyalty schemes, etc., or to gain access to their corporate network.

FMT Octopus™ also has the potential leap from the virtual to the physical world. Imagine the individual who arrives at work and generates a unique one-time password on his corporate mobile phone to enter the building, logon to his corporate workstation, access his personal online bank accounts and debit funds from an expense account to use a nearby vending machine. Of course, the application has the embedded security of locking down the technology in the event of loss or theft, all without the inconvenience of remembering passwords.

Finally, the application can work just as effectively outside of corporate boundaries – such as secure door entry to get in/out of a car park or into a home. FMT has solved the inconvenience of remembering numerous passwords or carrying different forms of authentication tokens in order to go about our day-to-day lives.

Other information the judges should know

1. FMT Octopus Fact Sheet
2. Website link: www.fmtworldwide.com 
3. FFIEC guidance note representing imminent global legislative moves towards mandatory compliance http://www.ffiec.gov/press/pr101205.htm

Important up-date 26th March 2007

http://askmerrill.ml.com/markets_news_story/1,2263,%7B7FD8B06A-7E18-4D6D-BB51-3D4117BEDF2B%7D,00.htm