Bluevine saved $150K in fraud losses and enhanced the customer experience
“I have confidence in Inscribe. It’s proven to be a highly valuable tool that we rely on to prevent substantial losses.”
When it comes to risk management, many organizations prioritize fraud prevention, focusing on identifying and stopping high-risk or malicious actors before they do significant damage. But for fintechs like Bluevine, an effective risk management strategy should also utilize the latest technological innovations to achieve maximum efficiency with minimal impact to good customers.
“Having confidence in our decisions about who to onboard as a customer and what services to offer them is critical,” explains Jakob Weyland, who leads risk strategy for the organization. “There are two risks we face as a team: One is that we serve a high-risk customer and take an unnecessary loss. But the other is that we lose a good customer because we mistakenly believe their documentation may be fraudulent.”
As a veteran fraud risk leader, Jakob is as skilled as they come at spotting fraudsters. But when it comes to document checks in the digital age, even he admits that relying on the human eye alone is no longer enough to catch the work of master manipulators.
“When you work in risk management, you try to become an expert in what bank statements should look like. And quickly, you realize that’s really hard to do,” he explains. “I know the pain of that process when it’s done manually. When you rely only on human reviewers, you have human error and biases. Automating that process isn’t just cost-efficient, but also much more accurate.”
For Bluevine, turning down good customers has other downstream effects, like bad reviews and customer complaints, which could potentially lead to reputational harm to the brand.
"While trying to prevent fraud, there’s always the risk of losses, however, I believe even more painfully, you risk damaging your relationship with good customers. A wrong decision doesn’t just affect one customer. They tell others in their network, in the industry, and it starts to tarnish the brand."
For Bluevine, finding the right risk intelligence partner to help them automate the document review process came down to a combination of factors including pricing, performance, integration, and evolution.
“Pricing and performance are always at the top of the list,” says Jakob. “With Inscribe, which is utilized across multiple parts of our business, it is important to not only have strong performance — it also needs to be economical, or the value is reduced.”
Integration with Bluevine’s existing toolset and workflows was also an important consideration.
“There are a lot of great products out there, but something vendors often overlook is the integration aspect,” he explains. “The integration process is so intensive that by the time you get the solution up and functional, it’s late in the game and losses are mounting.”
Finally, the Bluevine team valued a tool that would evolve with the changing needs of the market.
“Fraud changes over time,” explains Jakob. “There are some risk vendors that don’t adapt their products to keep pace with what’s happening in the fraud landscape.”
All of these factors brought Bluevine to Inscribe’s Risk Intelligence platform. They implemented the tool across their fraud detection and lending onboarding functions, enabling teams to quickly and accurately identify alterations made to real documents or the use of forged documents.
The team especially enjoys Inscribe’s X-ray feature, which allows reviewers to peel back the many layers of a document and pinpoint precisely where and how a document was changed.
"Sometimes you get into the mode where you believe much of what you are seeing may be fraud — even as a seasoned investigator. Having a feature like X-ray gives us confidence in our decisions. Thinking back to when I was leading fraud operations in my previous role, if I had a tool like this, it would have made my job significantly easier."
Leveraging Inscribe to automate Bluevine’s fraud detection and underwriting processes has helped the company operate more efficiently and accurately. The company is able to save time by avoiding manual reviews while also reducing errors that might let a nefarious actor slip through or prevent a good customer from being served.
“The tool itself is great. It fits into our workflow; it solves a problem that everybody's facing, which is to authenticate documents,” says Jakob. “Inscribe has proven to be a highly valuable tool that we rely on to prevent substantial losses.”
On just one lending application, Bluevine was able to use Inscribe to detect manipulations in the prospective customer’s bank statements, enabling the company to avoid a potential $150K loss.
In addition to preventing monetary losses, using Inscribe also helps Bluevine provide a better experience to legitimate customers.
“The ROI for us is in terms of dollar losses as well as in experience, such as by reducing false positives,” explains Jakob. “Without a tool like Inscribe, it can be very difficult to definitively detect where a document was altered and then use that as the basis for a decision. Having that level of detail, that confidence is really helpful.”
Finally, Jakob and the Bluevine team feel like they’ve found a true partner in Inscribe.
“We see how the tool continually evolves,” says Jakob. “I have provided feedback on new features and the current tool and it’s always taken into consideration. Working with Inscribe feels like a partnership."
"I have confidence in Inscribe. What you offer in terms of performance, pricing, and integration — the product hits all three."
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