The way I see it, with the MI coming up to bat, that is what will drive anything, whether it's a customer journey, an operational change, or just the fraud strategy and the engagement.

From a professional element, knowing their stuff and just seeing them today talking from a data science perspective, these guys know what they're talking about. It seems really, really engaging.

When looking for a vendor, I look for communication and innovation.

Communication: Somebody you can actually work with, talk to, and get along with. We're not developing any code ourselves. The implementation changes that we are doing are literally being done between a third party vendor and a strategic partnership with CA.

We are the customer, but we are working alongside them, because obviously the operational impacts and building the strategy is from the ground up.

And you need to put scheme involvements in there. There are five third-parties that I'm dealing with on a day to day basis. CA has very much unified that. They have brought their experiences together with the schemes books. We own that relationship, so we have to drive the changes.

We couldn't ask for anything more, really. They really have unified that element given their experience. Going forward, we are looking to build our own roadmap against what regulation changes are coming up.

If it all goes well and we get our numbers down, then we can talk again for a higher rating.

Have a dedicated project manager who will be responsible for direct dialogue with the CA project manager. Ensure that all stakeholders go to that single point of contact to avoid any potential slowdowns.

Make sure that all CA Risk Analytics data is pushed into your data warehouse daily. The out-of-box tool kit is good for providing a high-level view. However, you cannot carry out in-depth analysis. To do this, the data must be pushed to your data warehouse where you can run analytical tools such as SAS to identify patterns and recommend new rules.

The reason I gave my rating of a nine was on the basis of us not having clear visibility into our billing structure. The original contract was based upon active cards, which is the number of cards that is stored in CA’s database system. Once a card is in the system, there is no way to validate whether that card was actually utilized during that billing month or not, yet the customer is charged for that card being stored. We also do not have an ability to remove the cards without implementing a $20K software module, which we really didn’t need because the software module primarily performed other functions but deletion of cards was just one of the many functions.

With no ability to validate activity, no active reporting to determine the validity of activity, and no ability to remove cards that would be considered inactive, lost/stolen, our costs increased month over month. I worked with the CA management team to revise the pricing model; but to me that is what needs improvement. The pricing construct can be very cumbersome.

They need to do their own research and understand what issues they're trying to fix in their organization. Different organizations have different issues that they want to fix and remediate.

Once they identify those issues and they're clear about what they're fixing, then you can work with CA to target the product to fix the problem that you're trying to address.

They are a leading company in this space. I think we've been very happy with this solution. Their expertise is very good.

When selecting a vendor for any solution, you're looking for the right product set and the right price, but critically, you're looking for the right people. Not everything works out to be as smooth as you'll always hope for. You really need a relationship that you can fall back on and actually discuss issues when they arise and fix them.

I would certainly recommend CA over other solution providers in this space for the reasons that I mentioned in terms of being very flexible and responsive to the customer's needs, having that experience now of being able to operate across multiple geographies, and looking to constantly invest and improve the performance of the solution as well.

I think that many of them are on the roadmap already in terms of making the solution work better in the mobile space, investing in collecting device information, more device information, more transaction information to improve the predictability in terms of the score of transactions to keep increasing the percentage of transactions that don't require customer authentication, while stopping more of the fraudulent ones and trying to get that balance as optimal as possible. Investing in the science behind that, the data behind that, making it work with more and more types of devices, bringing in touch ID, bringing in other forms of biometrics as well to make that customer journey much easier.

I would rate it with a nine right now, and I think the reason for that is I do think there's room for improvement in the technical support space. I think if CA can get that right, it could easily be a 10 right now.

Card holders have to step up for authentication. The fraud rates dropped for card not present fraud. We see that the non-3D Secure fraud is rising as well as account takeovers. That's why I think it's very good to have such a product in place.

When selecting a vendor, I want them to be straightforward, do a lot of innovation, and be a step upfront of the issues as needed. I think those are the most key and important things that we expect.

It depends on the scope and the size of your business. For us, being small, we're a small firm, Transaction Manager ticks our needs. But if you've got a bigger customer base, maybe more cards out there, maybe more fraud, CA can offer all the tools and technology that you need.

I would choose the tools that you want based on your customer needs, not your fraud loses. There's no point in spending thousands of pounds on a huge solution when actually one of the smaller solutions can meet your needs. We found that quite valuable for us.

It sounds funny, but when looking for a vendor, we've got to get on with the firm. We've got to have a similar culture to our business. Come and visit us. We're quite remote where we're based, so I think to come and have a face to face meeting, that's a big tick in the box without all these conference calls. If CA would do that for us, that's a big win.

We have to get on with the sales person and the project managers. We like the close relationship. That's part of our business is financial services. It's dealing with customers and we like that from our vendors as well. We like the close relationship. That's probably one of the biggest things we look for.

Card issuing/acquiring institutes must implement this product to secure their cardholders. The CA solution is a world-class product and others should consider using this solution.

I advise anyone that is looking for a payment security product to choose this solution.

At this point, I would implement other options due to improvements and MasterCard regulations regarding Identity Check and 2.0.

This is a good product, which is easy to deploy and has lot of user friendly features.