NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Accedia is a premium European IT services company with a strong footprint across 20+ countries, delivering compliant, scalable and secure innovation. Their long-term partnership with Castle Trust Bank, a UK-based challenger bank, exemplifies their work in Banking & FinTech. At the core of this decade-long collaboration is OmniPort, Castle Trust’s flagship point-of-sale platform.
Accedia is nominated in the Fraud Prevention category for delivering AI-powered fraud controls embedded directly into OmniPort. Unlike standalone fraud tools, OmniPort’s protections are native to the loan origination journey – adaptive to risk, largely invisible to low-risk customers, and designed to operate at high volume without compromising speed, customer experience or trust.

Several critical factors drove the need for a more secure lending approach among which Castle Trust’s own growth – a broader and more diverse retailer network, a growing number of first-time borrowers, often with limited credit history. On top of that, fraud becomes an ever-bigger threat, highlighting the exposure of online and POS related transactions to sophisticated digital crime techniques. Growing regulatory demands, such as UK’s Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty and know-your-customer (KYC)/ anti-money laundering (AML) compliance pose a challenge to traditional fraud detection methods.

OmniPort combines multiple fraud prevention techniques into one cohesive, real-time system: computer vision and facial recognition for identity verification, behavioral risk modeling to detect anomalous applicant behavior, a supervised-learning predictive analytics engine to proactively flag suspicious patterns, and explainable AI to make risk decisions transparent and auditable. This approach enables proactive fraud prevention – detecting subtle signals (e.g., timing patterns, device/IP clusters) that traditional static rules often miss.

The innovation is also in orchestration: OmniPort applies different fraud and compliance checks based on real-time risk signals, routing only suspicious cases for review while maintaining a seamless experience for most users.

Built to meet banking-grade requirements, the platform is designed for secure processing of sensitive data with encryption in transit and at rest, strict role-based access controls, regularly audited and tested. OmniPort also supports consent-based data exchange and encrypted communications for identity and behavioral data processing, aligned to GDPR and PCI DSS requirements.

Castle Trust achieved a 65% drop in reported fraud within six months of deploying AI-powered fraud detection, 40% faster response times for investigating high-risk alerts, and a 20% increase in customer-reported trust and safety perceptions. OmniPort’s real-time AI ID&V checks now complete in under 5 minutes for most users, helping secure onboarding without introducing friction.