The Nuts and Bolts of Fraud Detection

I come from a family of great mechanics, people smart enough to teach others how to fix things. I was the first computer scientist in the family, and they would always tell me how smart I must be. But I would always say, “If you screw up a car, it gets halfway down the block and something falls off. You know it right away. A bad piece of code, though? It can lurk for a long time before you find out the damage that it’s done.”

Any solution that anybody cooks up, no matter how great, still needs proper deployment. If I manufacture a sturdy screwdriver, it might still be bad as a chisel. If I buy an expensive calculator and only use it to add single-digit numbers, it’s a waste. And if I buy a giant pickup truck but only use it to go to the store once a week, again, not a great use of resources.

When it’s time to figure out exactly how to utilize a tool properly, you need somebody insightful to ask the right questions. What are your goals? How are you doing it now, and why is that inadequate? Are you more worried about bringing in additional revenue, reducing the friction of onboarding, creating a better user experience, eliminating costly identity fraud? It’s only when you have all the information that you can craft the optimal solution.

At Socure, we’ve created a powerful platform for verifying identities, with the goal of eliminating fraud and enabling fast, accurate digital onboarding. It’s based on machine learning, meaning the ingestion of massive stores of data (if you have to ask how much, then you can’t afford to do it yourself), to look for the patterns of fraud, to recognize good applicants from bad, and enable more legitimate transactions with far less fraud.

But this still requires a skilled, talented staff to deploy. Our customer success team learns everything they can about each customer’s onboarding needs, their compliance requirements, their thresholds, their current and desired waterfall logic. We want our clients to get the greatest possible performance, the greatest accuracy, the largest measurable ROI from our solution. Because that’s how we help them maximize their business, by helping them auto accept the largest number of viable consumers, and giving the boot to an equally large  number of fraudsters.

This same CS team also monitors our platform’s performance in real time, so we can proactively find anomalies. They also periodically perform business reviews in person (or right now, virtually), in case there are any necessary regulatory, logical, or other adjustments.

This means asking all the right questions. Too many software vendors say, “I have the answer: buy my stuff!” But that’s the wrong approach. The answer should be, “After asking all the right questions, I have the solution, but here is how you have to use it to get the best results.” If your provider hasn’t bored you to tears asking as many questions as possible, then they don’t know you, don’t know your needs, and don’t know how to help you meet your challenges.

Our data science and product teams continually upgrade our platform, regularly generating new predictors that look for fraud signals and other bad behavior. Each quarter, our models are refreshed using hundreds of millions of rows of training data to increase accuracy (see, I told you it’s more data than you can afford to use on your own). While that is happening in the back room, the customer success team is working directly with our clients to put all that accuracy and predictiveness to work. They’re the mechanics of Socure. And they make it all work.

This isn’t about products. This is about solutions. We solve problems, we enhance decision-making, we empower our customers in the process of onboarding only to do business with  those people they want. And this year, we are committed to being the first provider to achieve 100% identity verification. Data Science builds it, and Customer Success puts it in place. Because they take the time to understand the challenges that we meet together.

If you would like to learn more about Socure’s identity verification and fraud detection products, contact us today.