Lloyds Banking Group & O2 | Customer Stories

Providing customers with a safe and secure environment

The challenge

Any organisation that handles customers’ financial data faces a constant, ever-changing threat from fraud. The greatest challenge is to maintain robust processes that can resist fraud but – crucially – do as little as possible to affect the customer experience. Lloyds Banking Group uses mobile authorisation to confirm transactions such as a payment to a new account, or resetting a password. The bank sends an authorisation code to the customer’s phone to ensure it is a genuine transaction, or places a call to the customer’s registered number to authenticate the transaction. However, fraudulent sim swaps allow criminals to intercept phone calls as well as authorisation codes sent via text message. To prevent fraud the bank needs to know if a customer’s mobile number has had a sim swap or whether there is any other unusual activity on the number. Equally as important, Lloyds Banking Group needed to find a way to confirm this almost instantenously, without hindering the transaction for their customers.

The solution

O2 worked collaboratively with Lloyds to find a solution, developing our Smart Digits service. This allows the bank to know when a sim swap or call divert has been set up, and a decison can then be made on whether a transaction should proceed.