British Airways

The Problem

After implementing 3D-Secure on many routes, and enforcing it on the highest risk ones, the increasing fraud remained a challenge, and the results remained unsatisfactory, according to Andy Warman, Business Support Manager at British Airways. The fraud team spent almost half their time manually logging data with spreadsheets and other administrative tasks. Even then, that effort covered just 15% of BA flights, and screening captured only half of flights that were at high risk for incidents of fraud. During this time, BA decided to purchase a comprehensive solution for fraud management. The key requirement was scalability covering 100% of all flights through all direct sales channels and all major cards brands; BA also sought to reduce administrative overhead and have a built-in reporting capability.

Solution

In 2012, BA selected Accertify Fraud Management. Technical integration started in July, testing began in October, and the system went live in December on ba.com. All stages met the BA implementation plan. That schedule was set around the BA IT resource availability and was therefore longer than a typical deployment of Accertify’s solution. As of January 2013, BA began screening 100% of all flights booked through ba.com. System performance exceeded expectations. The fraud team had planned to run their manual procedures in parallel to the new system for 6 to 8 weeks but ended up switching completely to Accertify after three weeks. Call Centre screening went live in July 2013, and BA Holidays (for making vacation package reservations) went live in October.