Paygilant, the leading solution for frictionless mobile payments fraud detection, has demonstrated with Citi how it drastically reduces operational costs associated with mobile wallet transactions.

Paygilant, founded in 2014, provides an on-device mobile wallet fraud detection solution that minimizes both as mobile wallet fraud as well as customer authentication friction. The solution detects fraud on the mobile device itself in the pre-transaction phase as opposed to after-the-fact traditional legacy systems which are strongly dependent on call center operations for transaction validation.

Since mobile wallet transactions worldwide are expected to exceed $1.5 trillion by 2020, digital wallet fraud is climbing steadily - it already six times higher than card fraud. Banks are seeking to reduce this risk in a cost-effective manner.

In light of this, Paygilant has developed a product that learns and maps the spending behavior of the cellphone user and detects fraud at the point of sale on the mobile device. This eliminates the need to authenticate the vast majority of transactions, triggering an immediate authentication only upon a suspicious fraudulent attempt. This is in contrast with indiscriminate authentication which causes friction and a poor customer experience.

Dr. Matthew Yuschik, a multimodal mobile architect in the Global Consumer R&D group at Citi, mentored Paygilant on a Proof of Concept project as part of the Citi Accelerator Program at Tel Aviv for outstanding start-up companies. ""The Paygilant team had a very solid idea that took minor design tuning to provide a strong solution using an adaptive model of customer behavior to detect and handle fraud risk. This is extremely valuable to Citi,"" he said.

Paygilant also introduced an ROI calculator, built in conjunction with Citi that reflects how banks can reduce operational costs and save millions of dollars annually by moving transaction validation to the mobile device. This reduces costs, and also significantly increases fraud detection rates. ""Our ROI calculator provides banks with the tool to know exactly how and where Paygilant's solution helps in increasing mobile fraud detection and decreasing fraud resolution costs,"" says Ziv Cohen, CEO of Paygilant. ""Accurate and frictionless fraud detection is a major challenge for financial institutions and it will be more of a challenge as the opportunities for mobile wallets increase in scope.""