Security information and event management firm ArcSight today introduced a new product that it says will offer systems integrators in the financial industry an opportunity to deliver a higher level of value to customers in their fraud detection campaigns.

Cupertino, Calif.-based ArcSight pulled the covers today off ArcSight FraudView at its annual user conference. Designed directly in response to banking customers who had been customizing the ArcSight security correlation engine in home-grown solutions to fight fraud, FraudView offers a prepackaged solution that helps banks minimize fraudulent activity across their online banking infrastructure.

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“We had enough customers sort of hacking it out own their own that we said, ‘Well, we can formalize this.’ So we took what we learned from them and we built the new technology and then we packaged it up into a stand-alone server appliance,” says Rick Caccia, vice president of product marketing for the company.

The principle behind FraudView is to take the information streaming from multiple banking channels and bring them together to form a risk assessment picture by correlating risky factors such as whether the destination of the transaction is to a high-risk location such as Russia or China, whether the IP address used to initiate the transaction is one that has been used to conduct fraud in the past, whether the account itself is high risk or not and so on.

"As the amount of money flowing through online transactions rises, online criminals are becoming more aggressive and more sophisticated,” said Adel Melek, partner for Deloitte & Touche, in a statement. "To ensure trust in cyber transactions, organizations, especially banks and financial institutions, require effective, holistic and sophisticated monitoring controls for detecting and responding to online fraud."

Caccia sees the new appliance as a product that can help systems integrators drive more ROI from existing fraud technologies installed in customer environments.

“I think this is one of those areas for banks where over the past few years they've spent a lot of money on various types of security and fraud detection technologies and projects to secure their data,” Caccia says. “This gives SIs an opportunity to come in and provide some high-value services around strategy. They can say, ‘OK, you spent money on these various fraud detection products; now we can tie those together and give an ROI on those.'”

That could be a huge opportunity for systems integrators in the financial space who have been hit hard lately by customers’ cost cutting and cancellation of projects that do not offer high ROI.

“I think for system integrators one of the big challenges they have in this economy is making sure that they’re delivering value,” Caccia says. “Customers are cutting budgets, and the SIs need to make sure they're working on high-value projects. I think the interesting thing for them is that cyber-fraud remains both a hot topic for banks and financial services institutions and one that's growing.”