How does transaction monitoring work and why is it necessary?

Ragapay
3 min readOct 20, 2023

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Introduction

Transaction monitoring is a technique that enables businesses to notice unusual behaviour in their systems. This can assist you in preventing fraud, identifying network faults, and ensuring your company’s security. Transaction monitoring entails studying previous and current client data and interactions to obtain a complete picture of consumer behaviour. Deposits, withdrawals, and transfers are all possible. Most financial institutions employ tools to assess this data automatically

What is transaction monitoring?

Transaction monitoring is a method of keeping track of transactions. It consists of identifying unusual or suspicious behaviour and can be applied to find theft, fraud, and other criminal activity. Transaction monitoring ensures that all corporate policies are followed in all commercial dealings.

Why is it important?

Transaction monitoring is critical since it aids in the detection of fraud and other illicit conduct. As a business owner or investor, it also enables you to maintain tabs on your funds, which is essential.

A variety of uses for transaction monitoring include:

  • with the purpose of identifying suspicious activity that could be a sign of theft or fraud
  • To keep an eye on the money that is moving through your company’s accounts (for instance, cash management)
  • In order to make sure that staff aren’t stealing from the business’s accounts

How does it work?

A strategy to prevent fraud called “transaction monitoring” uses information about financial transactions to spot and stop fraud. Transaction monitoring has the main advantage of making it easier than other techniques to spot fraudulent behaviour.

Transaction monitoring compares the patterns of your clients’ transactions over time to what you would have predicted based on their past behaviour. If something doesn’t fit with our expectations, there’s probably something fishy going on here, and we need to look into it more!

What tools or software do you need?

You can track your transactions using a variety of software platforms. The most well-known of them is transaction monitoring software, which gathers data on every network transaction and stores it in an electronic file. You can do this to view all of your financial activity at any moment, including what was bought and sold as well as the dates on which it occurred.

Software is useful for more than just keeping track of transactions; it may track client purchases over time to give real-time insights into their behaviour so you can better understand how they utilise your goods and services. As an illustration, if someone purchases a movie ticket from one location but then decides to purchase it online, it may indicate that they ultimately didn’t enjoy the film; if they purchase tickets from several different sources before deciding on a particular venue based solely on price; etc.

Transaction monitoring enables businesses to spot questionable activity right away.

Transaction monitoring provides a thorough view of your company. It enables you to detect suspicious activities, fraud, and money laundering.

Suspicious Activity: Suspected illicit transactions can be spotted utilising transaction monitoring software. The software checks all incoming and outgoing transactions for odd or fraudulent behaviour. This helps to prevent prospective financial crimes such as fraud or embezzlement from occurring by catching them before they occur.

Fraudulent Behaviour: Fraudulent behaviour occurs when someone uses fake information to obtain access to funds that are not theirs (for example, stealing someone else’s credit card details). Using transaction monitoring software will aid in the detection of fraudulent activities so that appropriate action can be taken against the perpetrator(s).

Conclusion

Transaction monitoring is a powerful tool for detecting fraud and other security breaches. It also helps organisations to increase their security with no effort, making it a great alternative for firms wishing to improve their security practices. The benefits of transaction monitoring are numerous, but the most important is that it assists businesses in preventing costly losses from occurring in the future.

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