Tesco builds anti fraud platform for inline business
Tesco builds anti fraud platform for inline business

Technology centre for UK based retailer Tesco Bangalore has developed a data analytics based fraud prevention platform for online business which also gives customer insight for personalized service.

Retailer has traditionally gathered millions of bytes of customer information over the years and now tech centre has created a platform which detects online and offline fraud.

Vijay Nair, head of analytics at Tesco Bangalore, said “team of 18 people are focused on combating fraud for online businesses (food and non-food), buyer-supplier collusion fraud and colleague fraud at checkout tills. We have data analysts and domain expertise in spotting fraud trends. The skills that we look for are primarily analytical skills with experience of programming in any one of SQL or SAS. They provide discounts to first-time customers on their online platform, which requires entering a unique coupon code that is generated for every new customer. He said fraudsters were able to exploit a bug in their systems that ended up refunding customers incorrectly, in case of a cancellation. This was picked up as an anomaly by the rules engine and was corrected quickly. “For instance, a simple example would be a customer who, let’s say, is a vegetarian buying meat. Another fraud flag for us is bulk purchases, especially for products like alcohol, cigarettes, etc.,” Nair said, adding that the anomaly detection technique helps catch fraudulent customers who sign up from different IP addresses and email IDs to buy discounted products.

According to IDC, world wide data analytics market is posed to grow from $130 billion in 2016 to more than $203 billion in 2020. Tesco works with third party rules engine providers to screen order while the rules of flagging fraud are decided by them and is based on association with the customer.

 
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