The team at VIVA Finance experienced a fraud scare while expanding into new markets

VIVA Finance powers a mobile-first lending platform that offers loans underwritten primarily based on employment information, rather than credit history. Their application process is entirely online. 

While the company initially only served the Georgia area, they now lend in almost 20 different states with thousands of employers in their portfolio. But that expansion substantially increased their risk exposure. 

“Fraudsters were submitting altered documents from our recently added employers, so we didn’t have as much familiarity with what the standard documents looked like. That makes it harder for humans to detect anomalies,” Sr. Operations Analyst Sara Vozeolas explained.

“You can look back and say, ‘How did no one catch that?’ But when teams of people are reviewing literally hundreds of documents in a day, that’s a different story.” 

Sara saw that the level of sophistication being used to alter documents made the fraud signals invisible to the human eye — and she knew that it simply wasn’t fair or reasonable to expect her customer service team to catch those alterations. 

So she went looking for a vendor to help transform the team’s document review process. 

Sara decided to automate her document review process and improve fraud detection with AI

The first vendor Sara spoke with had human-in-the-loop document automation technology, which would help her team with parsing data. But Sara said that the fraud detection system was severely lacking: Not only was the tool unable to explain why it labeled a document fraudulent or not, but it couldn’t show her team what elements of the document appeared to be manipulated. The software couldn’t give her review team the confidence they needed to make lending decisions.  

So she kept looking.

When Sara first came across Inscribe, however, she was impressed by how robust the technology was. 

“With Inscribe, we get to see all of the fraud signals that were detected, like how the document originally looked and whether or not it resembles a popular template downloaded from the internet. It’s so helpful,” Sara said.

Now, the VIVA Finance team sends all borrower documents through Inscribe to be scanned for suspicious activity. If fraud is detected, the customer service team is flagged in Salesforce to give the document a deeper look. The team will then review the document manually to determine its legitimacy. 

Sara’s team also recently began using Inscribe to parse information from the documents they collect. 

“Inscribe’s pay stub parsing has been incredible. The fact that we don’t have to have our internal agents pull out net pay or annualize income significantly reduces the chances of human error and frees up their time from just staring at documents,” she said. “It really has improved our efficiency.” 

Sara reduced risk, increased efficiency, and gave her team data to make decisions with confidence

Sara said that with Inscribe, she and her team have much more confidence in determining which documents they can trust. 

“When we see a document come through and Inscribe says that it's trustworthy, I am able to use that data to say with a high level of confidence that we can lend to that applicant," Sara explained. 

VIVA’s team has seen a notable reduction in the time it takes to review an application since implementing Inscribe’s parsing functionality. While they have always fulfilled their brand promise to provide applicants with answers in two business days or less, Inscribe has enabled them to reduce that wait time to under one business day. 

“I've had a great experience working with Inscribe’s team. It can be really discouraging when you share feedback with a vendor and they don’t seem to care. But with Inscribe, I know they really listen to what I’m saying and will take action on my feedback. And that proactive feedback loop builds a really strong relationship,” Sara said. “This has been one of the easiest implementations I’ve worked on.”