For fintechs, the fight against fraud is ongoing and evolving. Adversaries are becoming more sophisticated, which means that organizations must constantly evaluate and enhance their risk management strategy to ensure they stay a step ahead.

Quickly and accurately detecting, inspecting, and preventing fraud is one of the biggest factors of success for fintechs and financial services organizations.

When companies more accurately assess risk, they don’t just lower instances of fraud and contain damages – they can also onboard more credible and worthy clients faster.

For every dollar saved on fraud, the company can pay it forward, investing in legitimate, well-intentioned customers who might have been deemed too high of  a risk previously.

To help you prepare for your 2024 risk management strategy, we’ve collected advice from 15 prominent leaders throughout the fintech, fraud, and risk management space — from digital banking and payments to corporate credit cards and consumer lending.

15 risk management tips from fintech leaders

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1. “Everyone in the industry needs to keep evolving, because the adversary — the people trying to commit fraud — are smarter, better resourced, and more creative than we can even imagine.”

- Rajat Bhatia, Senior Director & Head of Risk Management, Navan

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2. “The shift to online banking and lending during the pandemic has created more opportunities for digital criminals. As a result, detecting fraud is a top priority for many financial services companies today. Instead of relying solely on manual reviews to establish the trustworthiness of applicants who are looking to open an account or a line of credit, we need to complement them with products that make use of technology to deliver more accurate, efficient, and scalable solutions.”  

- Gordon Bowman, Partnerships & Integrations at Lendflow

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3. “Fraud is a growing problem for fintechs and financial institutions alike, specifically when it comes to document manipulation. …. This increase in fraudulent activity puts all companies on notice, which leads to tighter application requirements that deeply hurt SMBs’ ability to access vital capital to power their growth.”

- Srinath Srinivasan, Head of Risk, Ramp

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4. “Ten or twelve years ago — probably maybe even more recently than that — a lot of these fraudsters, they would need to be savvy in terms of going through the dark web to get a lot of the information that's [now] being communicated out there and open channels like Reddit and Telegram. I’ve certainly gone down a lot of rabbit holes these past couple of years trying to figure out exactly what's going on in the fraudster's mind to try to stay ahead of it."

- Patrick Lord, Director of Operations, Rapid Finance

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5. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new generation of fraudsters; people who are using online gathering places to work together to commit fraud.”

- Louise O'Connor, Data Scientist, Inscribe

6. “What I think is really interesting with the growth of platforms like Telegram, or other social media — even just Facebook, YouTube — is that the communication is going on in a less ‘official’ standpoint. We have fraud rings that are not part of a criminal organization…but they're communicating, they're sharing information in informal ways and, as a result, becoming fraud rings in a way that we haven't seen previously, which is really unique. Being able to recognize the similar usage of documents, formats, or templates is changing the way that we can approach this." 

- Michael Coomer, Manager of Fraud Management, BHG Financial

7. “We’ve absolutely seen the number of fraudulent documents and the level of sophistication within them go up over the past few years. … A robust data strategy is what will help stop the industry from lending money to the wrong entities. The modern organization has access to vast amounts of data from a variety of sources that can be used to inform decisions. Organizations just need to connect the dots."

- Ido Lustig, former Chief Risk Oficer, Bluevine, and CEO, bizi

8. “For financial institutions, the path to fighting fraud is not simple. Merely tightening current fraud prevention strategies runs the risk of cutting off access for legitimate consumers, while increasing the barrier to entry leaves out millions who are considered ‘thin file.’”

- Ronan Burke, co-founder and CEO, Inscribe 

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9. “People are getting good at creating deceptive documents. They know how to work the system. You can look back and say, ‘How did no one catch that?’ But when teams of people are reviewing literally hundreds of documents in a day, that’s a different story.” 

- Sara Vozeolas, Sr. Operations Analyst, VIVA Finance

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10. “The sheer level of sophistication being used to alter documents by some fraudsters at this time makes much of the fraud signals invisible to the human eye. Relying on your team to be an expert in every type of document is not just unreliable, it’s unreasonable.”

- Daragh McMeel, Fraud Analyst, Inscribe 

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11. “Teams need to strengthen the capabilities that enable fraud agents to enhance their performance. Tools need to be integrated so that people working with data have all the information they need in one place. This is what will optimize the workflow and improve both speed and quality across operations.”  

- Lei Chen, Head of Fraud Risk, Marcus by Goldman Sachs

12. “I truly believe that risk managers need to be tech-focused. They need to ask what they can do differently to address the risks earlier and more effectively and, ultimately, strengthen the position of the company. Having a product and tech mindset is having a growth mindset.”

- Ashish Gupta, Chief Risk Officer, LendingPoint

13. "Technology without a method and strategy behind it is not going to do much good when it comes to fraud. Before you buy a tool or deploy a solution, the company needs to be aware of what they're trying to improve and what they're trying to achieve. And that means engaging frontline staff to understand those needs."

- Sacha Vasilkioti, Fintech Product Manager, Veriff

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14. “Success begins with good data. Knowing your average loss, the time it takes to investigate a case, knowing where the entry points are – you need that data to surface issues, make sense of them, and ultimately solve them.” 

- Dustin Eaton, Sr. Director, Payee Identification and Network Security, Zelis 

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15. “No single vendor on the market, no single data source can prevent 100% of fraud, 100% of the time. There will be holes in every solution. So when I say companies need to create a ‘Swiss cheese strategy’, the idea is that they should adopt a variety of solutions and line them up in a way that there are no gaps in coverage.”  

- Srinath Srinivasan, Head of Risk, Ramp

Arming your fraud, risk, and operations teams for 2024 

As fraud and credit risk become more adept and advanced, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between a legitimate customer and a looming threat. 

Fraudsters are hard at work, but so are we. Check out what our clients have to say about how Inscribe helps them approve more customers while keeping fraud and credit losses down. 

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 “As a lender in the startup space, fraud matters. We don't want defaults. People are watching our numbers. So Inscribe is invaluable because it has definitely helped us cut down on fraud and saved us from opening accounts with bad actors.”

- Sara Vozeolas, Sr. Operations Analyst, VIVA Finance

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“Inscribe helps us identify legitimate applications faster and instantly identify applications that need further attention. This frees up more time for our Fraud Operations team, giving them breathing space to focus on other key priorities that support our success and growth.”

- John Lynch, Sr. Director, Digital Account Opening, Amount

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“Our workflow was bottle-necked by a large volume of applications that on the surface all looked like good prospects. Inscribe helped us automate out the risk and fraud at the beginning. It liberated our workflows and employees to be able to process our valuable clients faster and offered so much more flexibility than the rigid, out-of-the-box solutions on the market.”

- Mike Mulrooney, Project Director - Operational Efficiency, Crédito Real

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“I've looked at a lot of other products, not just in this role, but in my prior roles, and Inscribe gives us the best fraud screening and offers a level of flexibility that others don’t match. We wouldn’t have been able to grow so fast without Inscribe.” 

- Amy Quarles, Compliance Manager, Gig Wage

“Inscribe improves the ability of an investigator like myself to efficiently review something that otherwise may take me up to an hour of time. Being able to instantaneously get a highlight of fraud indicators from the metadata that normally I have to manually review on each individual page and each individual data point on a document — it’s a huge uplift.”

- Michael Coomer, Manager of Fraud Management, BHG Financial

“Inscribe is a foundational risk management tool alongside Experian and Dun & Bradstreet. The platform pays for itself.”

- Rajat Bhatia, Senior Director & Head of Risk Management, Navan

Want to learn more about Inscribe’s award-winning fraud detection and document automation? Schedule a time to meet with an expert from our team.