Due to latency, cost, and consumer friction issues, fraud detection models are only performed on fewer than 10% of high-volume transactions today, implying that a large proportion of fraud goes undetected.
 
To help address this fraud detection gap, IBM has announced the IBM z16, which for the first time provides real-time AI (at scale) to corporate workloads like credit card, healthcare, and financial activities. For banks, this translates to the ability to prevent 60% of fraud today, which amounts to almost USD $329 Billion.
 
During a recent media briefing, IBM execs shared how IBM z16 is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that could be used to crack today's encryption systems, building on IBM's heritage of security leadership. Jose Castano, Vice President WW Sales IBM Z & LinuxOne, said, “When we built, developed, and designed the IBM z16, we had three things in mind that we thought would be important in the digital economy: Artificial Intelligence and optimisation of data. The second factor is cyber resilience, which refers to business continuity and security. The third is the hybrid cloud.”

“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,” said Catherine Lian, Managing Director and Technology Leader, IBM Malaysia. “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.”
 
Revolutionising Industries With AI
 
Financial institutions worldwide are grappling with the effects of fraud on their revenues and customer interactions. According to the "2022 IBM Global Financial Fraud Impact Report" by IBM and Morning Consult, credit card fraud is the most common sort of fraud among consumers in the seven nations evaluated.
 
The IBM z16 combines AI inferencing with the extremely secure and reliable high-volume transaction processing IBM is recognised for, thanks to its IBM Telum Processor. Banks can now detect fraud during transactions on a vast scale for the first time: The IBM z16 can handle 300 billion inference queries per day with only one millisecond of latency. For consumers, this might mean less time and effort spent dealing with fraudulent credit card transactions. For both businesses and card issuers, this might mean a reduction in revenue loss as customers avoid the annoyance of incorrect declines, which may lead them to use alternative cards in the future.
 
Data Protection With the Industry’s First Quantum-Safe System
 
As the industry's first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is underpinned by lattice-based cryptography, a method for building security primitives that help safeguard data and systems from existing and future threats. Businesses can future-proof their data and applications today with IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography.
 
"We felt it was important to be in a position of leadership to provide the foundation for our clients to start this journey and this process of replacing quantum cryptography with what we call quantum-safe cryptography, and that's what we're introducing with the z16," said Michael Jordan, IBM Distinguished Engineer and IBM Z and LinuxONE Security CTO.

IBM z16 clients may improve their cyber resilience posture and keep control of their systems with a secure boot (which means bad actors can't inject malware into the boot process to gain control of the system at startup).
 
Michael also stated that through their Hardware Security Module or HSM, the Crypto Express 8s, they are providing cryptographic algorithm support for digital signatures and key encapsulation mechanisms using CRYSTALS Dilithium and Kyber, as well as APIs so that organisations can begin changing and enhancing their algorithms to be quantum-safe.
 
Adapting to the Hybrid Cloud
 
IBM has spent the last three years investing heavily in open-source technology on the IBM zSystems platform and building a unified developer experience throughout the hybrid cloud. These solutions are designed to let their clients leverage their existing IT infrastructure, clouds, and applications in a seamless manner, while offering them the flexibility to run, build, manage, and modernise cloud-native workloads on their preferred architecture.
 
These solutions include IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack, IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center, Tailored Fit Pricing, Bringing Anaconda to Linux on Z and Streamlined Support.
 
With IBM z16, IBM used a very collaborative, client-centred approach, involving hundreds of people from more than 70 clients, a method that is already being used for future IBM mainframe systems. IBM z16 will be available on May 31, 2022.