Barclays processes circa 30 million-plus payment transactions a day for its 20 million-plus customers and had many fraud detection solutions in place across its various business units. Barclays knew transaction fraud detection required ultra low latency, but not having the ability to seamlessly re-use its large-scale user profile datasets across use cases across its business units resulted in multiple complex, bespoke engineering solutions. These solutions became increasingly difficult to both maintain and evolve, and thus posed a significant limitation to achieving the company’s strategy.
Implementing a new database technology, the payment fraud team at Barclays ended up with a fraud-detection system which solved its problems. The resulting solution could scale the Barclays dataset from 3TB to 30TB-plus over the course of just three years, share fraud rules across platforms, and facilitate machine learning consistently with an aim to achieve a maximum of two digit (<100) millisecond response time for the 99.99 percentile of transactions.