Last October, INETCO Systems Limited joined HPE’s NonStop Community as a Silver partner. The partnership that was built over the last two years will bring new opportunities and benefits for our community members.
INETCO’s Story
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, INETCO was founded in 1984 by Angus Telfer, an engineer who worked at several telecom companies, including Bell Telephone Labs – developing voice recognition software, protocol analysis, networking monitoring, telecommunications billing and quality of service technologies.
Like HPE, INETCO initially specialized in selling hardware. Our solutions included communications gateway products for dial-up point of sale and automated teller machine terminals, conversion of legacy network protocols to TCP / IP networks, transaction hosts and switches, and third-party electronic funds transfer processors for banking and payment processing.
INETCO’s experience in the banking and payment-processing space expanded into the application performance management (APM) space, and we began developing software that offered transaction performance analysis across servers, networks, and applications. The software product was branded as INETCO Insight and had three main use cases – fraud prevention, operations intelligence, and transaction monitoring.
With over 35 years in business, INETCO’s solutions have been deployed all over the world, leaving its global footprint in more than 35 countries.
NonStop Collector Project
The relationship between INETCO and HPE goes back to 2019 when INETCO’s Chief Technology Officer Ugan Naidoo first contacted HPE looking for options to collect payment transaction data for INETCO Insight.
Since INETCO Insight was developed specifically for payment environments, many of our customers were financial institutions. The majority of them were already working in the NonStop software environment, which is designed for mission-critical workloads and eliminates the risk of downtime.
Back then, INETCO Insight still didn’t fully support the NonStop environment. When INETCO lost a major client due to this fact, we started looking at the options to join the HPE community.
In 2020, we started a project to develop a NonStop Collector for Insight. Our engineering team gathered requirements from HPE’s engineering team, worked on the development, tested, and got the solution certified. It took about a year and a half to complete the project. Throughout this period, the HPE team was extremely supportive and responsive in helping INETCO successfully complete the project.
“At INETCO, we like to say that every transaction tells a story,” explains Bijan Sanii, INETCO’s President, CEO & Co-founder. “Event monitoring, machine learning, and analytics will only be as reliable and fast as your data. This is why we are obsessed with making sure our customers never miss the right details. We challenge traditional monitoring approaches because they need to change. Our goal is to help you think faster and go deeper into performance and fraud issues that impact revenue and customer experience. Collaboration with HPE on building our NonStop Collector was essential to improve the quality and reliability of our solutions.”
What’s Next
To stay competitive in today’s digital economy, many financial organizations and merchants invest in the development of open banking solutions to delight their customers. With more data stored on the cloud and available through 3rd party apps, it’s getting more and more challenging to ensure the security of sensitive personal, health, and financial data.
The Payment Services Directive (PSD2) that went live in 2018 enables customers to grant permission to third-party applications to access their banking information and complete payments on their behalf. With the customer’s consent, the third-party has access to the customer’s account and transaction details, and can also use this data for analysis and service improvement. The more applications have access to customer data, the more opportunities for fraudsters to interfere. The growing risk of data breaches or the misuse of data requires strong controls over data in real-time, as many payments now are instantaneous.
In September 2021, INETCO launched a game-changing payment fraud solution, INETCO BullzAI, that lets financial institutions and merchants detect and block payment fraud with granular precision, reducing false positives and fraud losses. The new solution acquires network and application data to which other fraud detection solutions don’t have access.
INETCO Collector for HPE NonStop doesn’t add a significant load to the system on which it’s running. No latency is added to transactions. It is designed for rapid software deployment.
INETCO BullzAI captures, decodes, correlates, and analyzes each payment transaction as well as every one of the message fields in real-time, from start to finish. Using this data, INETCO BullzAI is able to detect anomalies in a transaction using a card/customer-specific machine-learning model paired with behavioral analytics. This enables real-time risk scoring for every individual customer – instantly updated every time a transaction occurs. The result is greater precision and timeliness in fraud detection and reduced false positives and false negatives. INETCO BullzAI’s unique data intelligence platform is deployed at some of the world’s largest financial institutions, payment processors, and retailers.
“Our customers operate in very demanding, transaction-intensive environments,” explains Ugan Naidoo. “Our partnership with HPE helps us ensure 24×7 availability and data integrity that are essential for financial institutions, especially in times when most of the payments are digital and happening in real-time.”
Recently, we introduced another new offering – INETCO BullzAI Cybersecurity for Enterprise, that provides industries with a critical, additional layer of defense against sophisticated zero-day application-layer attacks, including DDoS, DDoS ransom, high-velocity, and APTs.
“Preventing cyber-attacks is an essential goal of every network defense strategy,” according to Stephen Lazenby, INETCO’s VP, Product Management. “We see gaps in current solutions that leave customers vulnerable and we can bridge those gaps. Without a doubt, traditional network firewalls, WAF, and WAAFs play an essential role. However, when it comes to attacks directed at web servers and API gateways, WAF and WAAFs can be slow to detect zero-day attacks and can’t block malicious traffic without negatively impacting legitimate transactions.”
INETCO BullzAI can automatically detect application-layer cyberattacks in milliseconds and automatically block malicious traffic without adding any latency to legitimate transactions. So even when a network is bombarded by malicious attacks, neither customers, revenue nor reputation suffer.
As we continue to expand our solution suite, our partnership with HPE will help both companies to better serve their customers in monitoring payment transactions and stopping fraud and cybercrime with surgical precision. This ultimately benefits our customers’ customers.
5 Strategies for Building Resilience to Financial Crimes and Cyber Attacks in 2022
Recent developments in real-time payments, open banking, and booming digital transactions have accelerated the need for converging cybersecurity, fraud, and AML domains to better defend against financial crime.
Watch the recording of our webinar with Stephen Lazenby, INETCO’s VP, Product Management, where we share strategies designed to help card issuers improve their resilience to cyber threats.
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