How My Business is Winning the Fight Against Fraud (and How Yours Can Too)
For as long as I’ve been in financial services, the battle between fraud teams and fraudsters has felt like a heavyweight title fight. Each side is constantly throwing new punches and adapting to their opponent’s strategies. I’ve spent decades in the ring, building and leading businesses. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to stay on your feet (mostly by getting knocked down).
In 2019, we founded Terrace Finance to connect merchants and consumers with the right lenders to support their goals. From day one, security was a priority: our team set out to protect our customers from fraud threats of all kinds, both for their peace of mind and ours.
My team knows it’s a mission I’m personally passionate about. Every day, our fraud team has to identify threats facing our business and get ahead of them before they cause damage. Personally, I love data and regularly spend time looking at our dashboards and detail records for signals of bad actors.
Lately, those attacks have changed. They’re more sophisticated, more targeted, and more intense. So, I sat down with my friends at NeuroID and Experian to dig deeper into what’s happening. I want to share what I found with leaders responsible for protecting their businesses.
A New Age of Fraud Attacks
Fraudsters have never been careless. We’ve always known they invest in technology and intel as much as fraud prevention leaders do, but recent attacks have been markedly more sophisticated. Seeing advanced human-like bots and large-scale attacks in action really showed me what kind of threats we’re up against.
One attack especially caught my eye. A massive wave of bots came in and tried to find a way through our defenses by changing one thing about their data inputs at a time. They were isolating variables, trying to zero in on what they thought was a weak point in our application. These testing techniques aren’t new, but the scale and efficiency with which fraudsters can execute them push traditional fraud detection solutions to their breaking point.
Luckily, we were able to spot and stop these advanced bots in real time (more on that in a moment). But it made me think: what about the other CEOs and fraud leaders who don’t have this kind of visibility? How would they even know they were under attack, let alone how to respond? That realization reinforced my commitment to staying proactive, not reactive, in Terrace’s defense against evolving fraudsters.
How We Fight Back with NeuroID and Experian
Being proactive means constantly evaluating our fraud stack. We ensure its stopping fraud before it reaches our lending partners, catching attackers as efficiently and effectively as possible. Behavioral analytics has been crucial in this; we brought NeuroID on to be our first line of defense against evolving threats, and it’s been a big step forward in our overall quest. Not only has it stopped sophisticated fraudsters that other tools can’t, but it detects them much earlier in our processes.
With NeuroID, we can watch in real time as fraudsters test our systems, tweaking their techniques to try and bypass our controls. NeuroID shows us the crowd-level indicators of an incoming attack and pulls back the curtain on fraudsters’ techniques with user-level session data. This level of insight, which was eye-opening the moment we turned NeuroID on, has helped us uncover sophisticated attack strategies that would’ve gone unnoticed.
Like anything, there is not one method that solves everything. NeuroID was added to our Experian product suite, which is part of our larger ecosystem, creating a defense that meets the wide-ranging needs of our business and customers. Experian’s team is as interested in our data as anyone at Terrace. I’m grateful to have a partner whose approach to fraud prevention is innovative and comprehensive to meet our mission.
My Advice for Leaders
Fraudsters are evolving faster than ever, and if you’re not actively working to stay ahead, you’re falling behind. The tools available to fraudsters, especially AI, increase the need for fraud prevention leaders to build a stronger system. There are three key points I recommend others focus on:
- Get closer to your data. Getting faster and more accurate data is crucial. NeuroID helped us monitor in real time and take action quickly instead of relying on reactive tools later in our processes. The more you understand how fraudsters operate, the better equipped you’ll be to stop them.
- Invest in the right partnerships. These products fortify our fraud stack, but our teams’ strategic alliance is just as impactful to our business. This is not a buy once, install, and forget it solution. NeuroID’s insights and support have helped us uncover new threats and craft the best response to them. Find partners who fit your needs and are as committed to innovation and security as much as you are.
- Make fraud prevention a company-wide priority. It’s not just a job for your fraud team. Everyone, from executive leadership to product to customer service, should understand the role they play in protecting your business and your customers. For us, as part of a sophisticated process with multiple other companies, we are committed to our role in helping stop fraud.
For more on Terrace Finance’s approach to fraud prevention, read our new case study with NeuroID. In it, you’ll learn how behavioral analytics helps us better serve and protect our customers and grow with greater confidence.
