Airbase is on a mission to help finance teams control their destiny. 

Invoice fraud is a serious and growing risk for all organizations — even those with excellent anti-fraud policies fall victim. That's why Airbase has an extra layer of protection to scrutinize transactions that move through its platform. As a company that moves large amounts of funds on behalf of its customers, it is not just protection for itself. Airbase is committed to investing time and resources into the protection of its customers’ funds.

Airbase’s risk management team is vigilant in alerting its customers whenever it detects that a payment could be to a fraudulent vendor account. To be successful in this work, Airbase relies on the best tools and the most advanced technology available. Leading the charge are Nayeem Mano (VP of Risk and AML Compliance), Preston Miller (Manager, Fraud and Chargeback at Airbase), and Preston's team of investigators and analysts, including Paul Sazon (Senior Fraud and Chargeback Analyst). They’re responsible for identifying cases of fraud across expense management and corporate card transactions.

However, as the Airbase team processed more and more cases per day for their extensive client base, it became difficult to manually review invoices and receipts — even with the assistance of their existing transaction monitoring tool — in shortlisting high-risk cases. 

“When our transaction monitoring tool alerts us to a potentially concerning transaction, we always look at the invoice because that gives us a lot of clues as to what is happening,” says Paul. “But doing a deep analysis of the invoice takes time and resources that we can’t really support based on our volumes.”

This raises another issue for the Airbase team: What exactly are they looking for in those flagged invoices?

“There’s a lot to keep track of,” admits Preston, a seasoned risk management professional with extensive training and experience. “Our investigators need to know all these different data points to look for and what variances may exist. They need to review the creation and modification dates, the file’s metadata like the author, the software, and so on. It’s not efficient to complete that process manually — and, for me, it’s not efficient to continuously train investigators on what to look for either.”  

With every case of missed fraud potentially leading to significant losses for Airbase or Airbase’s customers, Preston needed a tool to help him and his team make the document review process more efficient and the fraud identification process more robust.

“Fraud is a constant game of investing in the procedure, whether that's money, time, or effort, and making sure you’re getting ROI on that investment,” he says. “I needed something that would replace my years of knowledge, training, and practice that I could roll out to my entire team and help them do those same tasks.” 

Airbase’s search for a risk intelligence solution brought them to Inscribe.

In a crowded and complex market, Preston valued Inscribe’s trial period, which allowed him and his team to use the tool in their day-to-day work before officially being onboarded as a customer. 

“That was actually what sold me on Inscribe,” says Preston. “We were able to use Inscribe in a sandbox. I put a suspicious invoice in, and the X-ray feature caught six different things, including a bank account number that had been modified. It’s that function — being able to actually see the previous versions of the document and what was changed — that really set Inscribe apart.”

In that case alone, Airbase saved a customer from $36,000 in fraud losses.

But impressed as Preston may have been during the Inscribe trial period, he needed to convince his senior leadership team that the investment was both necessary and valuable. And for that, he channeled the old adage “seeing is believing.”

To get Airbase leaders on board with this investment, Preston decided to demo Inscribe’s X-ray feature live in front of multiple stakeholders. He showed them a fraudulent invoice, which was indistinguishable from a real invoice — at least to the human eye — then uploaded the file into Inscribe and showed the group where changes had been made. The rest is history, and Airbase signed on as a customer shortly after that.

Airbase is avoiding fraud losses and shortening document review times.

Airbase credits the Inscribe tool with helping them to save $126k in fraud losses in just a few months of use, benefiting both Airbase and its customers. Along with this significant savings, Inscribe has also enabled the team to dramatically shorten the review period for documents — taking the average time down from 2-5 minutes to less than one minute.  

It’s this winning combination of efficiency and accuracy that has made Preston an advocate for Inscribe, both internally and externally.

“I've already recommended this tool to a few people because it’s very impressive,” says Preston. “I even sent it over to one of my mentors, one of the people who brought me into the financial fraud world and spent hours teaching me how to look for fraudulent documents. I wanted him to check Inscribe out.”

As for Airbase, the team plans to expand the tool’s use and functionality in the coming year.