Camino Financial was founded on the idea that many minority small business owners and micro-entrepreneurs want to be a positive force in their community.

For underbanked micro-business owners, including first-time borrowers (i.e. No FICO) and ITIN holders in the United States, Camino Financial is a reliable source of accessible, long-term, affordable loans. Camino Financial’s simple, secure, and transparent loan application process makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to access the capital they need to invest and grow.

And that’s where Jose Anzaldo, Senior Credit Originations Manager, and his team of underwriters and analysts comes in. They work together to provide loans, lines of credit and wealth-building solutions to help small business owners, especially those in underserved communities, take their business to the next level.

While Camino Financial wants to help fulfill the dreams of as many small business owners as possible, every loan or line of credit comes with some degree of risk. They need to be sure that credit is extended to people and companies that will have the means to repay those loans — not only to protect the viability of the Camino Financial, but to help fuel the cycle of success for future applicants.

Some underwriters call it a “spidey sense” — that feeling they get when something is not quite right with a document but they can’t pinpoint precisely what. For Jose and his team, that intuition is invaluable, though it can be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to prove.

While Jose’s team previously relied on a competitor tool to perform a first round of document checks, he and his team were not satisfied with the number of false positives the solution produced and switched back to a manual review process.

“The output that we were getting from the other OCR tool was not great because we had a lot of false positives,” said Jose.

While reverting back to manual reviews was more accurate than that tool, it still wasn’t the answer for Jose’s team. Checking every line of a document for signs of tampering could take up to 30 minutes for an individual reviewer and result in a group of analysts coming together as a committee to discuss their suspicions. This entire process was inefficient and still potentially error-prone.

“Any time you’re doing something manually, there will be things you miss, especially when working at volume.” said Jose. “A lot of times we would get PDF statements but there is only so much that a manual reviewer can look for. We can’t analyze the metadata as well as an automated tool can.”

So Jose was on the lookout for high-quality document review tools to assist his team. When he fielded a call from a member of Inscribe’s sales team, because of his past experience, he was most concerned with how accurate the tool would be.

“Our top priority really was that the product works,” said Jose. “When the potential for fraud is high, we wanted the best product that we could get. And that's what we saw with Inscribe.”After several meetings and demos with the Inscribe team, as well as a trial period, Jose and his team deployed Inscribe to automate all document reviews to support the company’s underwriting and closing processes.

Camino Financial now uses Inscribe software to review all PDFs submitted by applicants. The tool leverages advanced technology to detect signs of fraud that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye. This not only helps improve the accuracy of the reviews, but also reduces processing times and eliminates subjectivity from the decision-making process.

The most common issues Jose and his team encounter? Amendments to transactions and balances, which is a type of first-party fraud that applicants use to inflate their assets, income, or ability to repay a loan. The team also sees applicants using fake bank statement templates that can be purchased online. And in some cases, Camino will even receive a real bank statement with altered contact information.

After deploying  Inscribe, Jose and his team realized that 28-35% of all documents submitted monthly through one partner within their ecosystem were fraudulent.

With this information, Jose and his team were able to refine their partner model and eliminate this source of fraud — instantly reducing their risk profile in a big way.  

The average loan approved by Camino is around $60,000, so Camino can capture the value of Inscribe to the company’s bottom line every time a fraudulent document is detected. In addition, the company also benefits from time and cost savings through shorter review periods and avoided follow up activity for late or delinquent payments.  

“With Inscribe, you upload the document and you get what you need,” explained Jose. “It really cuts down the time we were spending on underwriting and closing. It saves us time and money by not dealing with fraudulent customers or high-risk partners.”

And because Camino is avoiding fraudulent accounts with the help of Inscribe, Jose’s team now has the ability to route available funds to qualified applicants who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to receive a loan or line of credit. That helps Camino fulfill its mission to fund more dreams within minority and under-served communities.