Coast makes same-day decisions on 90% of applications and reduces manual review with Inscribe

Manual document review was slow, costly, and created friction for customers

Coast offers fuel cards, corporate cards, and expense management software for trade businesses. Built for employees in the field, Coast supports purchases like gas, tolls, parking, and job supplies, while integrating into customers’ accounting systems, field service tools, and telematics platforms. 

As Coast grew, the risk team faced a familiar challenge: balancing strong fraud and credit controls with a fast customer experience. In credit products, speed matters. If onboarding takes too long, good customers may move on before Coast can even approve the account. 

Before Inscribe, document review was heavily manual. The team relied on internal templates and checklists to spot signs of manipulation, looking for details like spacing inconsistencies, formatting differences, or mismatches in ID templates. This approach required significant effort and was difficult to scale as application volume increased. 

Bank statements were especially time-consuming. Coast needed to parse transactions, evaluate revenue, and confirm document legitimacy, all at once. In practice, reviewing a single customer could take an hour to an hour and a half. Documents were often uploaded out of order or scanned poorly, creating additional back-and-forth and slowing down decisions. 

Coast needed a faster, more scalable way to verify documents early in underwriting, without adding friction for legitimate customers.

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Coast embedded Inscribe into underwriting to automate document verification and transaction parsing

Coast’s approach to fraud prevention starts at underwriting. The team’s goal is to stop fraud before a bad actor becomes an existing customer, because controls applied later can create friction and false positives for legitimate users. 

To support this strategy, Coast integrated Inscribe into its underwriting workflow through Alloy. Documents uploaded by applicants flow through Alloy into Inscribe, and Inscribe’s results flow back into Coast’s systems. Most applications move quickly through this automated workflow, while higher-risk cases trigger verification and deeper analyst review. 

Inscribe delivered value across both credit and fraud use cases. On the credit side, Coast used Inscribe’s transaction parsing to separate true income from transfers and padded inflows. This made it easier to evaluate real cash flow and make more accurate credit line decisions. 

On the fraud side, Inscribe provided stronger evidence for document legitimacy by surfacing metadata and tampering signals that manual review could not reliably detect. With Inscribe, Coast could answer credit and fraud questions in one workflow, without slowing down the customer experience.

Faster decisions, lower operational burden, and stronger protection against high-cost mistakes

With Inscribe integrated into underwriting, Coast reduced manual work and sped up decisioning. What used to take an hour or more per customer now requires no work at all for most applications. When a case does require review, analysts can typically complete it in five to ten minutes using Inscribe’s portal and summaries. 

This shift reduces friction for customers and helps Coast maintain strong service-level expectations. Coast tracks a goal that 90% of applications are decided the same day, and automation has helped the team meet that benchmark. 

Inscribe also helps Coast reduce the risk of costly mistakes. Coast issues credit lines ranging from small limits to as high as $3 million, so a small number of missed fraud cases can lead to significant losses. By strengthening fraud and credit verification during underwriting, Coast can make faster decisions without compromising diligence. 

Today, Coast’s underwriting process is faster and more defensible, even as fraud tactics continue to evolve. Signals that once helped identify bad actors, like intent checks and phone validations, are becoming less reliable as fraudsters use tools like ChatGPT to sound legitimate. 

With Inscribe, Coast can rely more on document-level evidence and metadata to make confident decisions early, protecting the portfolio without adding friction for good customers.