John’s team was looking for a faster way to identify even more fraudulent loan applications

In an industry where efficiency and accuracy are key differentiators, financial technology provider Amount needed to set itself apart by being able to detect fraudulent documents and applications within seconds—not hours.

This fast-growing FinTech had already automated many of its processes for verifying its Bank Partners’ loan customers. However, one key task was still being meticulously carried out by human subject matter experts: authenticating applicants’ incomes and addresses on supplied documents.

“Manually reviewing supplied documents was a major part of our specialists’ workflow,” explained Senior Director of Fraud and Verification Services John Lynch. “It was their job to review the documents and if they saw something that might be risky, like it belonged to a known template or there was something high-risk about a document, they’d go ahead and escalate that to our Fraud Operations team for further investigation.”

Verifying the legitimacy of every application and document in such a manual way was taking up enormous chunks of the team’s time. Meanwhile, fraudsters were becoming increasingly proficient at constructing high-quality fake documents that were difficult to detect by the human eye alone.

What Amount needed was a faster, more accurate way to trust the documents supplied by the customers of their banking partners.

“We urgently needed to find a faster, scalable process that we could use alongside our human expertise to build greater efficiency in our process, and standardize our risk-screening and decision making,” John said.

Enter Inscribe. A solution that enabled Amount to speed up their application processing and detect more fraudulent documents while increasing the certainty of their fraud detection.

Inscribe’s document fraud detection delivered unprecedented insights in seconds

Amount dug deep to find a solution and uncovered a document fraud detection product, called Inscribe.   

They learned that Inscribe was used and trusted by leaders in their industry to detect fraudulent customers with minimal effort and greater accuracy. So they just had to try it.

Amount had two options at their disposal—a fraud investigation tool or deeper API integration. Initially, they decided to use Inscribe’s fraud investigation tool to support and corroborate existing investigations. 

Using the tool was fast and straightforward. It required no technical build whatsoever to get started, and offered:

• Speed and efficiency: when the Fraud Operations team has suspicions about whether they can trust a document, they upload it to the tool, which takes just 5-10 seconds. If needed, they can upload thousands of documents at once.
  

• Fraud detector rigor: Inscribe analyzes the document(s) across an industry-leading range of 20+ fraud detectors, including:
  a. Metadata analysis—any traces of suspicious behavior, including suspicious software or date inconsistencies, are uncovered in the document’s metadata.
  b. File forensics—every detail of a document is examined to uncover evidence of fraud. The software returns a level of analysis that’s impossible to identify with the naked eye.
  c. Blacklists—the software catches repeat offenders and intelligently tracks key details automatically.
  d. Fingerprints—Inscribe compares known legitimate characteristics to the characteristics of consumer-supplied documents.
  

• Improved document analytics: Inscribe classifies uploaded documents by their type, format, and language. This allows managers to analyze where fraud is coming from in their document sets. 

• Enhanced compliance: Inscribe automatically identifies the relevant date in the document to ensure it’s within the accepted timeframe. It also matches names and addresses to ensure they are what is expected, saving specialists the time and hassle of doing so.

• Continuous improvement: Inscribe’s team works with Amount to capture all their feedback on the software, so they can continually reassess its performance, hone its accuracy and optimize configuration. 

“Inscribe is already proving to be a great corroboration tool,” says John. “It’s fast and simple to use and enables Amount to augment our normal processes and detect more fraudulent documents autonomously.”

Ultimately, John hopes to integrate Inscribe’s API. This will help detect fraud even more efficiently by removing the need to manually upload documents and enabling them to design their own set of rules that automatically flag risky documents.

Inscribe adds fraud detection rigor and greater scalability to the application process 

Since adding Inscribe into their document review process, Amount has optimized its document review process—enhancing their platform with greater efficiency. This is a huge win, because it enables them to further streamline their operations and enable its bank partners to convert more customers.

In one example, their Fraud Ops team used Inscribe to carry out retrospective analysis of a complex fraud ring. The fake documentation was so realistic that human specialists hadn’t been able to identify the forgeries. But Inscribe knocked it out of the park, correctly identifying fraudulent documents among 43% of applicants. This equated to a 23% increase in the efficiency of their document detection.

“Inscribe was able to identify fraud on incredibly realistic documents,” says John. “It’s helped open our eyes to the new risks faced by our industry as fraudsters become ever more sophisticated.”

Not only that, John says he’s seen increased efficiency across the team.  

“Inscribe helps us identify legitimate applications faster and instantly identify applications that need further attention,” says John. “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 is both happy and relieved to have plugged the final gap in their risk-rating process.

“Inscribe has added additional rigor to our fraud checks and ensures we catch fraudulent documents efficiently. It has brought a new level of accuracy to our fraud detection that gives all our partners confidence that we’re identifying more fraud, and converting more applications. Our partners feel good that we’ve picked a tool that has comprehensive coverage for risk screening in the digital landscape.”