Feature-Level Fusion of Super-App and Telecommunication Alternative Data Sources for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Identity theft is a major problem for credit lenders when there’s not enough data to corroborate a customer’s identity. Among super-apps—large digital platforms that encompass many different services—this problem is even more relevant; losing a client in one branch can often mean losing them in other services. In this paper, we review the effectiveness of a feature-level fusion of super-app customer information, mobile phone line data, and traditional credit risk variables for the early detection of identity theft credit card fraud. Through the proposed framework, we achieved better performance when using a model whose input is a fusion of alternative data and traditional credit bureau data, achieving a ROC AUC score of 0.81. We evaluate our approach over approximately 90,000 users from a credit lender’s digital platform database. The evaluation was performed using not only traditional ML metrics but the financial costs as well.