Scenario
A UK-based FinTech launched the world’s first instalment credit card, offering users financial peace of mind and control over their spending and repayments. Its co-branded credit card solution combines instalments, rewards and a premium experience to help brands attract and retain customers — driving growth through new revenue streams and fostering long-term loyalty.
Upon launch, the FinTech encountered a rise in fraudulent applications, primarily due to identity theft and impersonation. To safeguard customers and revenue, it implemented Document Verification Selfie Control, which reduced fraud but introduced additional friction for customers. An effectiveness assessment revealed the current process resulted in a false positive rate of 61% and an abandonment rate of 48% among genuine customers during onboarding.
The organization aimed to reduce successful fraudulent applications while maintaining seamless customer journeys for legitimate users. It partnered with TransUnion® to achieve the following key objectives:
- Mitigate the growing fraud risks associated with increased originations
- Improve customer experiences (CX) for genuine users
- Reduce false-positive rates
Strategy
The organization conducted a live trial of TruValidate™ solutions to complete a digital risk scorecard — measuring effectiveness against the existing strategy. The scorecard findings provided the confidence to implement layered fraud controls powered by TruValidate solutions, including Device Risk, Mobile Risk, Email ID, and Real-Time Fraud Alerts.
Based on the assessment findings, the FinTech implemented three strategies using TruValidate:
Device Risk: Applying device intelligence to fraud challenges can enhance fraud detection rates without compromising CX. TruValidate Device Risk tracks relationships between devices, accounts and transactions, leveraging device histories and confirmed fraud reports from our global consortium. Configurable to the unique needs of any organization, Device Risk helps deliver friction-right consumer experiences while better mitigating fraud and enabling legitimate users and applications to proceed more swiftly.
Mobile Risk Analysis (UK): Verifying customer-provided phone numbers in real time can bolster fraud defenses without requiring additional customer input. TruValidate Mobile Risk uses live requests against mobile network data to identify the phone type, reachable status and network status of numbers provided. The underlying phone intelligence consortium leverages multiple risk signals, including search velocity, call behavior and reported fraud. These insights are aggregated into a risk score. The strategy scorecard proposed for the client includes both low- and high-risk bands to deliver a balanced view of the risk involved.
Risk Suite Analysis (UK): Understanding links between individuals and data points, such as email addresses and phone numbers, can help build additional trust with consumers while simultaneously flagging unusual or high-risk scenarios. TruValidate Risk Suite uses more than 1 billion search transactions to build linked associations between individuals and these data points. High-risk signals are flagged to help identify instances where an email or mobile number has been linked to multiple different individuals.
Results
The adoption of TruValidate fraud controls, including Device Risk, enabled the organization to achieve its objectives of ensuring fraud mitigation and friction-right customer journeys — resulting in tangible, positive outcomes, such as:
- Reduced friction for 87% of applications
- Lowered false-positive rates from 61% to 12.5%
- Identified incremental fraud cases that might have been missed with legacy controls
Learn more about Device Risk and how it can help your organization reduce fraud and deliver more seamless customer experiences.
