Enhance fraud detection with Activator in Microsoft Fabric
Being able to monitor, detect and act on events based of your data plays a crucial role in making data driven decisions. Activator allows you to monitor events, detect certain conditions on your data and act on them by sending alerts.
Using Activator to monitor Bank Transactions
Contoso Bank, a fictitious bank, is dedicated to enhancing its security measures by leveraging real-time data to monitor fraudulent activities on bank transactions. As part of their requirements, they aim to implement a system that sends teams or email alerts when a transaction, specifically of the type ‘transfer’, exceeds a certain threshold, such as $2500, within an hour, thereby flagging it as potentially fraudulent. Additionally, the bank seeks to ensure that clients do not withdraw more than the permitted amount. If a withdrawal that meets or exceeds this limit occurs, an alert will be sent. These requirements are part of Contoso Bank’s commitment to safeguarding their clients’ assets and maintaining the integrity of their financial operations.
To achieve this, you can use Activator to create new rules/alerts on specific events related to transactions. By tying these events to an object, such as Transactions, and monitoring the properties of transaction data, it becomes possible to identify and act on potential fraud. Alerts can be configured to trigger when a transfer exceeds $2500 within an hour, or when withdrawals surpass the allowed limit, enabling prompt responses to safeguard financial integrity.
1 – Create rules on events
Before using Activator to create new rules/alerts you need to stream your data into Microsoft Fabric. You can get your data from different data sources like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Azure DB for PostgreSQL and more. To set up an event stream follow these steps and this documentation for creating an activator artifact.
Creating rules on events allows you to get an activation for every event that comes in on the event stream. These kinds of rules will help you get an alert every time a new event comes in and the value for a column in that event meets the defined condition, for example when the Transaction Location is New York.
- Inside of your Activator, select your event stream then select New Rule. Then define how your rule will be triggered by setting the condition and what you want your rule to do by setting the action of your rule.
2 – Create rules on events that tied to an object
Creating rules on events that are added to an object work similar to rules created on events. However, you can track events for specific object IDs or Transaction IDs. The added benefit is that you can use properties from the same or other event streams that added to the same object.
- You need to set new rules on events added on the object with its properties and can achieve this by creating a new object of your event stream called Transactions and choose the fields you want to use. In this case, Amount, TransactionType, Location etc. would suffice. Follow these steps to create an object for your event stream.
- Next, you need to create a new rule on the event added to the object you created. You can select the event then select New Rule and then define how you want the rule to be triggered by setting the condition to check if the amount is equal to or above $10000 and filtered down the property to check for a specific transactiontype like withdrawals. Also provide details for the action once the rule has been triggered.
- Activator gives you the ability to see the project number of activations for your rule for all and specific object IDs on the Analytics tab then the History tab shows you the actual activations/triggers that have happened for your rule.
3 – Create rules on properties
To meet the requirement for kicking off alerts when a transfer exceeds $2500 within an hour you would need to create an alert on a property which allows you to monitor a property on an object over time.
- You create a new rule on the Amount property to cater for the requirement, select the Amount property then select New rule on the top navigation bar. Follow these steps on create a new rule on properties.
- Then, you need to define how the alert will be triggered by defining the condition where the Amount value increase to or above $2500 and set the occurrence to when this condition has been true for 5 minutes or an hour. You want this trigger for specific transactions so you can set the property filter to look at the Transfer transaction type.
Note: Activator is not limited to the above, it also allows you to detect for a variety conditions like numeric changes, numeric states, text change, text states and more.
- Then define the action details by either sending the alert to Teams or on an email. Activator also allows you to see a preview of your rule when you select edit action to makes changes to it.
- Once completed, you can save and start your alerts to receive notification when your conditions have been met.
There’s more you can do for a Fraud Detection scenario with Data Activator, we provided a baseline of how you would approach it and for other scenarios.
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