January 2013

What Makes Good Fraud Management Software? 9 Questions for Tal Eisner of cVidya

interview with Tal Eisner

Is Your Fraud Management Solution a Good One? 9 Questions for Tal Eisner from cVidya

You, me and everyone who works for a living is a “product expert”. And if we don’t manage an actual product that’s sold to a customer, then the product we manage is ourselves, the value of the services we provide to our employer.

Now putting that product’s value into words is not easy. I mean, when you meet up with friends and family at a class reunion, party, or wedding, how do you explain to them what you do for a living? For me, it’s never easy, especially when my friend’s knowledge of telecom is limited to the cell phone in his hand.

So that’s what this interview is about. At the TM Forum in Orlando, FL, I met up with Tal Eisner, Senior Director of Fraud Management Solutions and Strategy in cVidya. Then I peppered him with questions to tease out the most important features of his software product — and more broadly, of any Fraud Management System (FMS).

So here you go: some highly edited Q&A that hopefully crystallizes many of the software features a buyer should consider when selecting any FMS.

1	Fraud management solutions have been around for a long time, but there are still a lot of small operators out there who view an FMS solution as optional. What do you say to them?

Tal Eisner: Dan, I’d say they are gambling at the casino. Many people compare fraud management to buying auto or life insurance. I agree with that and I would add that an FMS is a unique kind of insurance, the kind that has a very short shelf life, because if you don’t keep it updated, it loses its value very quickly because the fraudsters are coming up with new threats all the time.

2	What are the most important requirements for good fraud management software?

I guess the short answer is that good fraud management software needs to continuously evolve and mature over many years.

An FMS is a living and dynamic thing because the threats are ever-changing. Our adversaries are technically savvy and well-funded criminal organizations who have targeted telecom as an ideal place to steal money. Yet as soon as you plug one fraud hole, they are finding other places to penetrate our defenses.

So the collective intelligence in the software and the operator-to-vendor partnership required to make it all come together makes a huge difference.

The scalability of the FMS solution also matters greatly to some clients. For instance, we have an operator customer in Brazil with more than 90 million subs and a footprint in mobile, fixed, cable, and broadband internet Even the fraud management staff is big at this operator — more than 60 analysts working 24/7 shifts.

3	How do you manage to keep your FraudView software up to date and synchronize the many rules changes and the need to constantly address new threats?

An expertise in fraud management doesn’t come from sitting in a lab or reading articles on the internet to find out what threat feature to add to the suite three months from now.

On the product side, we work hard to ensure the software is as flexible as possible. For instance, the FraudView “ad-hoc reports” capabilities enable non SQL experts to easily generate queries and reports from free format text.

The number, size, and variety of data sources has greatly expanded over the years too. Call detail records are still key, but today our customers are taking in feeds from a wide array of sources — even things like financial platforms supporting Mobile Money and malware detection mechanisms in security. And these new interfaces and new patterns are then embedded back into the product.

4	How do you get customers involved in improving the FMS product and getting new fraud scenarios into the suite?

Our predefined controls library is key here. FraudView’s built-in controls library is constantly being written and updated with input from fraud managers and analysts around the world.

Let me give you an example. Bypass fraud is one of the most damaging fraud types worldwide. The customers that we have in Asia Pacific suffer huge losses because of bypass traffic. Fortunately we now supply them with a dedicated bypass module based on the experiences of our other customers.

One particularly helpful addition in this bypass area came from a customer’s ability to detect the activation of SIM batches — firing up multiple SIM cards at the same time. This batch detection capability was a real breakthrough and it is now embedded in our FraudView baseline software, so all our customers can share and benefit from our experience.

In the mobile money area we are often getting daily inputs from operators in Africa and Asia where that service is on the rise. In fact, a tier 1 operator in Africa (22 million subs) launched its mobile payment service only after we provided them with the proper controls to monitor this new service. This set of controls are now offered as part of FraudView.

5	What performance and scalability issues do fraud managers need to be concerned about in the future?

With the rise of mobile broadband in particular, we expect FMS performance and scalability issues will spike in importance in the years ahead.

By the way, you can’t just plug in these systems and expect them to scale. It often takes years to stabilize such large systems. This is key aspect of so-called “product maturity”. Without that scalability, you’re not going to succeed with Tier 1 operators, such as one Asia Pacific client of ours who now processes over 10 billion records a day on our solution.

The need for real-time detection is another driver of high performance and scalability. Real-time detection can minimize financial damage because you are detecting it that much faster. In services such as PRS calling and PBX hacking this is definitely the case. When you are detecting illegal attempts to hack into IVR’s, it’s also key.

6	Over the last decade, a number of software firms have dropped out of the fraud management market. Why did those companies fail?

Fraud management is a constantly evolving space and fraud departments at the telcos have become more sophisticated. The challenge for fraud departments to keep up with evolving technology has never been greater. So I think the fast paced nature of the fraud business is what’s made it hard for the small vendors to keep up.

Being in the fraud management space for many years, I remember certain niche players who launched big marketing campaigns, but in the end had a too-narrow product offering, so they could not stay in the game over the longer term.

7	What will the impact of Mobile Money and LTE be on fraud?

You’re right to identify LTE and the Mobile Money as the two biggies. I would say we are all still learning. There are still a lot of unknowns here.

Now Mobile Money has been established in several areas around the globe for more than two or three years in Africa and in the Far East. We have 2 customers that launched Mobile Money services a year and a half ago and we work closely with them on detecting new fraud patterns in this domain.

Regarding LTE, we recently showed our capabilities in a Catalyst project that was presented in the TM Forum Management World Americas event in Orlando. The project was championed by operators such as Digicel, Etisalat Misr, MTS Allstream, and Rogers Communications, and it demonstrated detection and analysis of the vulnerabilities related to LTE.

8	Is fraud management forever destined to be a cost to the business? Can it be turned into something that will enhance the telecom's relationship with its customers?

I think the secret to turning an FMS into a business enhancer is to focus on protecting the enterprise customers who are affected by fraud threats. One particular area of promise here is feeding vital intelligence about PBX hacking.

PBX hacking is a headline topic with telecom operators these days. The CFCA says PBX hacking is the number one fraud issue around the world with 4.6 billion U.S. dollars of damages worldwide.

Early in 2012 we launched our enterprise fraud management package which goes a long way to containing PBX hacking issues. Once again, this solution was the result of a customer contribution.

Actually, a fraud manager at one of our customers worked with an enterprise customer of theirs who owned a PBX. A reporting relationship was created where the fraud department would alert the enterprise PBX owner whenever there was a suspected case of PBX hacking.

Little-by-little, this relationship got tighter as the enterprise manager came to view the operator’s fraud report as a valuable service. So this is how we came to build the enterprise fraud management module into FraudView. Today, some of our operator customers resell the solution to their enterprise customers as a service.

Not only does this fraud alert service increase the stickiness of an enterprise customer, it also boosts the reputation of the fraud department within the larger telco organization because fraud management is no longer a mere cost center.

9	Tal, thanks for these insights. To close, are there any other factors we’ve not yet discussed you view as important?

Dan, the final thing I think buyers need to be mindful of is the actual business model of the FMS supplier. An FMS will generally gravitate to one of two poles: either a product-heavy or services-heavy solution. In the services-heavy model, the vendor sells a base software product, but makes most of its money on add-on professional services such as consulting and making configuration changes.

FraudView, by contrast, is a product-heavy solution. We throw as much intelligence as we can into the product itself, realizing that the client gets the freedom and flexibility to configure the product on its own with very little handholding required from us.

So how do we accomplish that? Well, many vendors will offer you additional consulting services around best practices, but to us, best practices is often a matter of simply embedding more pre-defined controls in the product. Similarly, rather than sell consulting around fraud rule creation or the setting of thresholds and filters, we embed those rules into the product itself and let you decide which rules you want to activate.

To be honest, it’s the expert users and managers at our clients who supply many of the innovations in FraudView. Listening to our clients’ suggestions and studying their problems gives us valuable input on new features we need to add to FraudView, whether it’s to detect new threats , add new controls, or improve other aspects of the product.

In a sense, we maintain two monitoring systems for fraud. The first is a our FMS product that detects fraud through rules, controls, and analytics. But our second — and equally important -- monitoring system is our own eyes and ears. It’s about being close enough to customers that when they have an issue, we can respond quickly to protect them, then add these new capabilities to the product so that the benefit can be shared with our greater family of customers.

NOTE: Are you a product manager or expert whose solution serves the business assurance or telecom analytics market? Then contact Black Swan’s editor Dan Baker to explore conducting a similar Q&A interview.

Tal Eisner

Tal Eisner, Senior Director Product Strategy as cVidya Networks, has been active in the telecom arena for over a decade in several fraud management roles.

Tal started as a fraud prevention team leader at Cellcom, the largest mobile carrier in Israel, then served as Director of global consultancy services atCtel Ltd. In 2008 Tal became Fraud Prevention Department Manager for Partner Communications Ltd (Orange Israel) until mid 2010.

At cVidya he manages fraud management products, strategy, road map and developments. Tal is a graduate of the Tel Aviv University and earned his BA in political science. Contact Tal via

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Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change. Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating. In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
Driving Customer Care Results & Cost Savings from Big Data Facts — interview with Brian Jurutka — Mobile broadband and today’s dizzying array of app and network technology present a big challenge to customer care. In fact, care agents have a hard time staying one step ahead of customers who call to report problems. But network analytics comes to the rescue with advanced mobile handset troubleshooting and an ability to put greater intelligence at the fingertips of highly trained reps.
Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems. This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers. But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process. This white paper points to a solution — a collaborative solution designs system — and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation. This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings. The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds. Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
Decom Dilemma: Why Tearing Down Networks is Often Harder than Deploying Them — interview with Dan Hays — For every new 4G LTE and IP-based infrastructure deployed, there typically a legacy network that’s been rendered obsolete and needs to be decommissioned. This article takes you through the many complexities of network decom, such as facilities planning, site lease terminations, green-safe equipment disposal, and tax relief programs.
Migration Success or Migraine Headache: Why Upfront Planning is Key to Network Decom — interview with Ron Angner — Shutting down old networks and migrating customers to new ones is among the most challenging activities a network operators does today. This article provides advice on the many network issues surrounding migration and decommissioning. Topics discussed include inventory reconciliation, LEC/CLEC coordination, and protection of customers in the midst of projects that require great program management skills.
Navigating the Telecom Solutions Wilderness: Advice from Some Veteran Mountaineers — interview with Al Brisard — Telecom solutions vendors struggle mightily to position their solutions and figure out what to offer next in a market where there’s considerable product and service crossover. In this article, a veteran order management specialist firm lays out its strategy for mixing deep-bench functional expertise with process consulting, analytics, and custom API development.
Will Telecoms Sink Under the Weight of their Bloated and Out-of-Control Product Stacks? — interview with Simon Muderack — Telecoms pay daily for their lack of product integration as they constantly reinvent product wheels, lose customer intelligence, and waste time/money. This article makes the case of an enterprise product catalog. Drawing on central catalog cases at a few Tier 1 operators, the article explains the benefits: reducing billing and provisioning costs, promoting product reuse, and smoothing operations.
Virtual Operator Life: Enabling Multi-Level Resellers Through an Active Product Catalog — interview with Rob Hill — The value of product distribution via virtual operators is immense. They enable a carrier to sell to markets it cannot profitably serve directly. Yet the need for greater reseller flexibility in the bundling and pricing of increasingly complex IP and cloud services is now a major channel barrier. This article explains what’s behind an innovative product catalog solution that doubles as a service creation environment for resellers in multiple tiers.
Telecom Blocking & Tackling: Executing the Fundamentals of the Order-to-Bill Process — interview with Ron Angner — Just as football teams need to be good at the basics of blocking and tackling, telecoms need to excel at their own fundamental skillset: the order-to-cash process. In this article, a leading consulting firm explains its methodology for taking operators on the path towards order-to-cash excellence. Issues discussed include: provisioning intervals; standardization and simplicity; the transition from legacy to improved process; and the major role that industry metrics play.
Wireline Act IV, Scene II: Packaging Network & SaaS Services Together to Serve SMBs — by John Frame — As revenue from telephony services has steadily declined, fixed network operators have scrambled to support VoIP, enhanced IP services, and now cloud applications. This shift has also brought challenges to the provisioning software vendors who support the operators. In this interview, a leading supplier explains how it’s transforming from plain ol‘ OSS software provider to packager of on-net and SaaS solutions from an array of third party cloud providers.
Telecom Merger Juggling Act: How to Convert the Back Office and Keep Customers and Investors Happy at the Same Time — interview with Curtis Mills — Billing and OSS conversions as the result of a merger are a risky activity as evidenced by famous cases at Fairpoint and Hawaiian Telcom. This article offers advice on how to head off problems by monitoring key operations checkpoints, asking the right questions, and leading with a proven conversion methodology.
Is Order Management a Provisioning System or Your Best Salesperson? — by John Konczal — Order management as a differentiator is a very new concept to many CSP people, but it’s become a very real sales booster in many industries. Using electronics retailer BestBuy as an example, the article points to several innovations that can — and are — being applied by CSPs today. The article concludes with 8 key questions an operator should ask to measure advanced order management progress.
NEC Takes the Telecom Cloud from PowerPoint to Live Customers — interview with Shinya Kukita — In the cloud computing world, it’s a long road from technology success to telecom busness opportunity. But this story about how NEC and Telefonica are partnering to offer cloud services to small and medium enterprises shows the experience of early cloud adoption. Issues discussed in the article include: customer types, cloud application varieties, geographic region acceptance, and selling challenges.
Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques. The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
Real-Time Provisioning of SIM Cards: A Boon to GSM Operators — interview with Simo Isomaki — Software-controlled SIM card configuration is revolutionizing the activation of GSM phones. The article explains how dynamic SIM management decouples the selection of numbers/services and delivers new opportunities to market during the customer acquisition and intial provisoining phase.
A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain. Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.
Achieving Revenue Maximization in the Telecom Contact Center — interview with Robert Lamb — Optimizing the contact center offers one of the greatest returns on investment for a CSP. The director of AT&T’s contact center services business explains how telecoms can strike an “artful balance” between contact center investment and cost savings. The discussion draws from AT&T’s consulting with world class customers like Ford, Dell, Discover Financial, DISH Network, and General Motors.
Mobile Broadband: The Customer Service Assurance Challenge — interview with Michele Campriani — iPhone and Android traffic is surging but operators struggle with network congestion and dropping ARPUs. The answer? Direct resources and service quality measures to ensure VIPs are indeed getting the quality they expect. Using real-life examples that cut to the chase of technical complexities, this article explains the chief causes of service quality degradation and describes efficient ways to deal with the problem.
Telco-in-a-Box: Are Telecoms Back in the B/OSS Business? — interview with Jim Dunlap — Most telecoms have long since folded their merchant B/OSS software/services businesses. But now Cycle30, a subsidiary of Alaskan operator GCI, is offering a order-to-cash managed service for other operators and utilities. The article discusses the company’s unique business model and contrasts it with billing service bureau and licensed software approaches.
Bricks, Mortar & Well-Trained Reps Make a Comeback in Customer Management — interview with Scott Kohlman — Greater industry competition, service complexity, and employee turnover have raised the bar in the customer support. Indeed, complex services are putting an emphasis on quality care interactions in the store, on the web, and through the call center. In this article you’ll learn about innovations in CRM, multi-tabbed agent portals, call center agent training, customer treatment philosophies, and the impact of self-service.
21st Century Order Management: The Cross-Channel Sales Conversation — by John Konczal — Selling a mobile service is generally not a one-and-done transaction. It often involves several interactions — across the web, call center, store, and even kiosks. This article explains the power of a “cross-channel hub” which sits above all sales channels, interacts with them all, and allows a CSP to keep the sales conversation moving forward seamlessly.
Building a B/OSS Business Through Common Sense Customer Service — by David West — Delivering customer service excellence doesn‘t require mastering some secret technique. The premise of this article is that plain dealing with customers and employees is all that’s needed for a winning formula. The argument is spelling out in a simple 4 step methodology along with some practical examples.

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