About Galileo Instant Verification Engine

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Availability

This product is accessible to all financial institutions, whether you manage your own fraud policy or utilize Galileo’s managed services.

Account and ownership verification is a critical component of the financial transaction process, ensuring funds are transferred between legitimate accounts by authorized entities. The Galileo Instant Verification Engine (GIVE) provides robust, real-time insights into external bank account and ownership verification to mitigate the risk of sending or receiving funds from risky accounts or individuals. GIVE can operate as a standalone product or seamlessly integrate with the Payment Risk Platform (PRP) for enhanced functionality.

GIVE is designed to offer enhanced risk signals for external accounts. It also integrates with the PRP to provide comprehensive risk controls for money movement. PRP uses a transaction decision rules engine that employs multiple verification methods and profiling techniques to deliver instant assessments of account and ownership risks.

Features and capabilities

Instant account verification – External bank account information is instantly verified, confirming its existence, status, and risk signals. This helps you make informed decisions when linking bank accounts or processing money-movement transactions. For instance, you can determine if an account is open, closed, invalid, or has a negative balance. Additionally, it assesses account tenure, such as whether the account has been active for less than 30 days, less than 60 days, less than 180 days, or 180 days or more, and identifies non-demand deposit accounts (non-DDA), providing a comprehensive view of the account's reliability.

Instant identity verification – Ownership of an external bank account is verified by matching the account holder's name and personal information—such as social security number (SSN), date of birth, and address—against the provided owner details. In case the account type is business it performs a fuzzy matching on the business name as well. This feature is particularly useful for preventing identity fraud and ensuring that only authorized individuals can transact, providing peace of mind for both you and your customers.

Account risk profiling – Machine learning is used to generate risk scores for individuals based on their provided information. The probability of ACH returns and the risk of non-sufficient funds (NSF) returns are available as risk scores, which were trained and tested based on the external account’s transaction history. By profiling account risk, you have visibility into the blind spots in order for you to predict potential issues and take proactive measures to mitigate them, enhancing the security and efficiency of your financial operations.

GIVE vs. other options

Compared to manual verification or MDA, GIVE offers significant advantages:

• Reducing fraud – Proprietary and third-party tools to help reduce fraud
• Time-to-verify – 0–3 business days (MDA or manual) vs. seconds (GIVE)
• Customer drop-off rates – Close to 50% (MDA) vs. as low as 1% (GIVE)
• Seamless customer experience – Multiple manual steps vs. automated instant verification
• Omnichannel impact – External account linking: ACH, Wires, FedNow, check deposit, and more

Compared to other industry service providers in the verification space, GIVE can provide better performance:

• Broader use case coverage - GIVE can support me-to-anyone use cases unlike other account linking vendor’s solutions that require the customer to type in the credential for the external account
• Less customer interaction - GIVE works in the backend as an API request and response without interrupting the customer experience*
• Single API integration - GIVE provides (1) Account Verification, (2) Ownership Verification, (3) Reason codes, (4) [Optional] PRP Decision Rules Engine results in a single API
  _{* Depending on your T&C, you may need to get a consent from the customer to share the account details for fraud detection/prevention purposes.}

Risk API

GIVE is a standalone product and is not limited to the clients who process their card and/or money movement transaction through Galileo. Risk signals of an external account can be returned via the Risk API using the Get instant verification endpoint.

Integration with PRP

Combining GIVE and PRP improves your ability to fine-tune advanced risk features and provide deeper insights into fraud events and patterns. Here are some scenarios where the combined visibility of both ACH and debit card transactions proves to be valuable:

ID theft – Fraudsters often load funds into newly created accounts immediately, followed by rapid card transactions or outgoing funds transfers to monetize their gains. By integrating GIVE with PRP, Galileo can detect these patterns early across GIVE and PRP.

• GIVE retrieves the risk signals of the external accounts where the funds are from
• Both GIVE and PRP detect a high dollar ACH transaction into the low-tenure account opened with the stolen identity
• PRP recommends the approval/decline decision in real-time both on the fund load events and on the high velocity card transactions based on your risk appetite

Account takeover (ATO) – In ATO cases, fraudsters typically link a valid bank account and maintain a regular spending history to avoid detection. This is often followed by rapid transactions of repetitive amounts or linking a new bank account for large ACH transfers out. This integration allows Galileo to identify these abnormal patterns and flag potential ATO attempts by correlating account linking events with unusual transaction behaviors.

• GIVE pulls risk signals on the recently linked external accounts
• GIVE provides risk scores of the ACH transactions
• PRP detects outliers in the pattern using its Machine learning clustering algorithm
• PRP returns recommended transaction decisions in real-time

Use cases

These use cases illustrate how GIVE seamlessly integrates into various financial transactions, providing real-time account and ownership verification to ensure secure and efficient operations.

Use case 1: Bank account linking

Sarah, a customer of the FinTech company HelloWorld Inc., wants to link her external bank account to her HelloWorld account to facilitate easier transfers and payments. When Sarah submits her request, HelloWorld calls GIVE via its API to validate the external bank account's existence, type, status along with the ownership of the account based on the provided information. GIVE quickly returns risk signals and a recommended decision in real-time on whether the account is safe to link. Using this information, HelloWorld determines if Sarah's request can be approved to be linked.

Use case 2: ACH transaction

David, an employee of Incognito Inc., needs to receive his salary via ACH into his personal bank account. Before processing the payment, Incognito Inc. uses GIVE to verify that the provided bank account truly belongs to David and that the account is in a good status to receive the funds. GIVE instantly provides account details and a risk evaluation, confirming the legitimacy of the account. With this verification, Incognito Inc. proceeds to originate the ACH credit, ensuring David’s account can receive his salary.

Galileo setup

Contact Galileo to inquire about setup and initiate your fraud-strategy consultation sessions.