Interview with Katherine Mayo: An agent-based analysis of real-time payments and fraud risk mitigation

In their paper Fraud Risk Mitigation in Real-Time Payments: A Strategic Agent-Based Analysis, Katherine Mayo, Nicholas Grabill and Michael Wellman consider real-time payments, and employ an agent-based model to investigate potential strategies for banks in the face of fraud. We asked Katherine about this work, why it is an important topic, and how the team went about tackling the problem. Payments generally adhere to the following sequence of steps: initiation by the sender, processing by the bank, and then final funds are released to the receiver. The standard debit or credit transactions most people are familiar with often suffer delays in their processing of one or more days. However, recent advancements in technology have allowed for the introduction of a new, faster payment type boasting drastic decreases in processing times.