Skimming Protection Solution enables financial institutions to reduce skimming costs while improving ATM availability and consumer confidence

NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) today introduced its advanced anti-skimming technology, Skimming Protection Solution (SPS). NCR’s innovative SPS provides financial institutions with a proactive way to address today’s ATM skimming challenges and deliver maximum availability and convenience to their customers. SPS thwarts skimming activity, notifies a financial institution of an attack in real time, and adapts quickly to new types of attacks as they become increasingly sophisticated. With NCR’s proprietary technology embedded in SPS, financial institutions will be able to deliver the highest level of ATM security to protect their brands and strengthen consumer loyalty (view a demo of how SPS works here).

“According to a recent report from the UK Cards Association, fraud losses from skimming and cloning accounted for £42.1 million in 2012,” said Andy Heyman, senior vice president, NCR Financial Services. “Furthermore, European ATM skimming attacks are also on the rise, with frauds increasing from €232 million to €260 million last year. Our goal with SPS is to reduce these hard costs to financial institutions while helping them fulfill a major part of their brand promise around confidence and security for their customers.”

Card skimming represents 80 percent of all attacks against the ATM, the #1 ATM crime globally. In a typical attack, criminals attach a device in the entrance to the card reader that captures account information stored on the magnetic stripe of the user’s card. In conjunction, the criminal also attaches a miniature camera to the ATM to record the user’s PIN. The card data and PIN are paired together to steal money out of the user’s checking and savings accounts.

NCR built SPS software to enable its random, multiple-jamming hardware module to block criminal “listening” devices from capturing card data. The new technology also prohibits criminals from tampering or removing the original ATM bezel and helps promptly detect fraudulent devices. These features help provide reassurance and maximum availability to both financial institutions and their customers.

In addition, SPS constantly reports on the health of the ATM. Through specialized software, SPS can report in real time any attempt to tamper with or disable the jamming signal to law enforcement and the financial institution, helping retain consumer confidence.

The breakthrough security improvements that SPS delivers come not only from innovative technology, but also from the solution’s design. Built on a modular platform, SPS lets financial institutions quickly adapt their security measures to address new threats without taking the ATM out of service.

“Skimming-related counterfeit card fraud is the leading type of third-party card fraud resulting in losses for card-issuers,” said David Fish, senior analyst with Mercator Advisory Group. “Solutions that mitigate this risk are sorely needed in the marketplace, as any card issuer who’s been targeted with a skimming attack can attest. ATMs have become particularly attractive to fraudsters given the potential to harvest not only magstripe data but also customer personal identification numbers. Once both factors of authentication are compromised, thieves can drain accounts of funds in a matter of minutes.”

SPS will be available for motorized card acceptance in all of NCR’s global markets immediately and on DIP machines before the end of the first quarter of 2013. The solution is available for purchase in all new SelfServ ATM orders, and as a retrofit option for existing SelfServ units.

About NCR Corporation

NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) is a global technology company leading how the world connects, interacts and transacts with business. NCR’s assisted- and self-service solutions and comprehensive support services address the needs of retail, financial, travel, hospitality, gaming, public sector, telecom carrier and equipment organizations in more than 100 countries. NCR (www.ncr.com) is headquartered in Duluth, Georgia.