One Year later – A Veteran's Perspective
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Well, hard to believe that it has been a year since I joined Memento. I am as excited today as I was when I joined the company, and I have been fortunate enough to work with a phenomenal team who has as much passion about fraud detection and prevention as I do.
Over the past year, I have been engaged in conversations with other fraud practitioners and it seems that not much has changed in that year, or over the past 21 years that I was a fraud manager, when it comes to the ideology of fighting fraud. It seems most banks continue to have an 'acceptable' loss budget (sometimes in the high five and six digit loss numbers), tolerate high false positive rates, endure outdated and layered systems that are so intertwined no one knows the effectiveness of each solution alone. Fraudsters continue to outpace the banks when it comes to innovation, and while I admit that some progress is being made in moving fraud solutions into this era, analysts and investigators are still hampered by minimal training, and often lack the contextual data needed review and quickly make decisions. The fact that check fraud exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 2008 proves the fraudsters continue to morph their fraud schemes to keep up with the product offerings, all while analysts and investigators continue to be handcuffed. But as long as the bank meets their targeted loss budget, then I guess it is not such a big deal.
As banks lose more of their ability to generate fee income, it is becoming more apparent that they need to ˜rethink fraud' and its impact on the bottom line. Having an 'acceptable' fraud loss budgeted is outdated and perhaps even 'unacceptable'. Outdated fraud tools and solutions that hinder the analysts and investigators from proactively and effectively detecting, stopping and mitigating fraud, is a hidden cost few managers really focus on.
But not all is lost. A significant change that I have been fortunate enough to be a part of is our ability to 'rethink fraud'. Memento truly takes a new approach to preventing fraud with more robust and accurate analytics, a state-of-the-art interface, and the ability to look at transactional and contextual data easily. Having worked fraud and spent countless years preventing, mitigating and chasing the fraud, it is refreshing to see that the old has succumbed to the new.
Do you want to improve your bottom-line? Are you willing to 'Rethink Fraud'?