IBM unveils innovative Telum chips to boost fraud detection

Tech giant IBM recently announced details about their new IBM Telum Processor at the annual Hot Chips conference.

Designed to enable enterprises to combat fraud in real-time through advanced deep learning technology, the Telum chip is the first IBM processor that contains on-chip acceleration for AI inferencing at the same time as a transaction is happening.

With fraud becoming an increasingly challenging issue for many organisations, those businesses that operate in banking, finance, trading, insurance are at particular risk of facing attacks from malicious criminals and scammers. A report by the Federal Trade Commission discovered that consumers lost more than $3.3 billion in fraud in 2020, sharply up from $1.8 billion in 2019.

“The new chip features an innovative centralized design, which allows clients to leverage the full power of the AI processor for AI-specific workloads, making it ideal for financial services workloads like fraud detection, loan processing, clearing and settlement of trades, anti-money laundering and risk analysis,” said IBM in a statement.

The Telum chip has been in development for three years, with IBM expecting to release a Telum-based system in the first half of 2022. When in use, it is hoped organisations can use the benefits this chip offers to enter into a fraud prevention approach instead of simply fraud detection.

There are a wide range of potential applications for this technological innovation including allowing financial institutions to speed up credit approval systems, better identify problematic transactions and expand rules-based fraud detection. It’s no longer enough to detect fraud after it occurs, with technological advances allowing fraud to be identified in close to real-time.