IBM Malaysia today hosted a media briefing on the new IBM z16 mainframe, its next-generation system that will bring real-time AI for transaction processing at scale.
The session was hosted by IBM Malaysia managing director and technology leader Catherine Lian (centre left) and IBM Z worldwide vice president Jose Castano (centre right) together with IBM Asia Pacific director (Z and cognitive systems, technology) Francis Goh (far left) and IBM distinguished engineer and IBM Z and LinuxONE Security CTO Michael Jordan (far right).
“IBM innovations, including the IBM z16, have formed the technology backbone of the global economy for decades. Today’s modern IBM mainframe is central to hybrid cloud environments, valued by 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, 8 of the top 10 insurers, 7 of the top 10 global retailers and 8 out of the top 10 telcos as a highly secured platform for running their most mission critical workloads,” said Jose.
“This next-generation system has been designed to help prevent fraud. This innovation is designed to enable clients to analyse real-time transactions, at scale – for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions,” he added.
Meanwhile, Catherine said that IBM is the ‘gold standard’ for highly secured transaction processing.
“Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission critical data lives,” she added. “This opens up tremendous opportunities to change the game in their respective industries so they will be positioned to deliver better customer experiences and more powerful business outcomes.”
Financial institutions worldwide struggle with the impacts of fraudulent activities on their revenues and consumer interactions. According to statistics from the police, Malaysians reportedly suffered losses amounting to about RM2.23 billion from cyber-crime frauds between 2017 and June last year (2021).
A total 67,552 cyber-crime cases were reported during this period with e-commerce scams topping the chart with 23,011 cases, followed by illegal loans (21,008) and investment scams with 6,273 cases.
But running deep-learning models at scale in real-time has not been possible due to latency issues, meaning fraud detections models are only run on less than 10% of high-volume transactions – a significant amount of fraud is going undetected.
IBM z16 uniquely brings together AI inferencing, via its IBM Telum Processor, with the highly secured and reliable high-volume transaction processing IBM is known for.
For the first time, banks can analyse for fraud during transactions on a massive scale: IBM z16 can process 300 billion inference requests per day with just one millisecond of latency.
For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card. For both merchants and card issuers, this could mean a reduction in revenue loss as consumers could avoid frustration associated with false declines where they might turn to other cards for future transactions.
Applying the new capabilities of IBM z16 to various industries can help create an entirely new class of use cases, including:
• Loan approval: to speed up approval of business or consumer loans
• Clearing and settlement: to determine which trades and/or transactions may have a high-risk exposure before settlement
• Federated learning for retail: to better model risk against fraud and theft
