Spectrum Message Services – About Us

Spectrum Message Services helps prevent credit-card fraud and assists customers in controlling their accounts, via real time mobile phone messaging. Our MoneyGUARD system can pay for itself by decreasing fraud and generating increased bank revenue. The customer experience is also greatly enhanced by the proactive nature of the system.

Spectrum Message Services was founded in 2004 by a group of banking payments and security executives. This group had seen the levels of fraud increasing for some time across many different markets e.g. skimming, phishing, credit card theft etc. Additionally, new technologies were either expensive, and slow to implement, or required major infrastructure upgrades. Fraud tended to migrate rather than be prevented. There was a need for an easy to implement system which would act quickly and enhance customer experience. In the banking arena, the system needed to be proven and reliable.

Gerard Vos, our Managing Director had seen just such a system operating in Hungary. It had been developed for OTP Bank, Hungary’s largest. Operating there for 5 years and reducing their fraud in 2 quarters when introduced in 1999, by over 90%. Since then their fraud levels continuously reduced to a value amongst the lowest in the world.

The aim is to utilize the widespread usage of mobile phones as an additional channel to contact customers when a card transaction is occurring, in real time. The customer receives full details of the time, merchant and location, amount etc at the time of the transaction via SMS. Various filters can be set to reduce the number of messages sent to suit the customers’ needs. For example amount thresholds, transaction types or geographic location can be set as filters.

Apart from the fraud reduction aspect, customer facing value added services like balance enquiries, real time credit limit adjustments and exchange rate queries are all supported. OTP Bank reports significant customer experience benefits from additional services such as these as well as a brand image improvement.

Spectrum Message Services was formed as a joint venture with the Hungarian provider of the technology, which have 10 years experience in this field and were the first to launch a commercial credit card protection service based on SMS. The company is rapidly expanding to address more geographic markets.

Currently Spectrum Message Services operates in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States of America, Hungary, Canada and Greece. The objective for each operating company is to ‘profitably reduce fraud while enhancing the customer experience’ for the banking community in their respective markets.