THE PROBLEM
A decade-long investment in legacy systems leading to substantial fraud losses & operational inefficiencies
In the last 2-3 years, Directions Credit Union saw a large influx of fraud including P2P, account takeover, ACH, and check. While their investment in a traditional legacy system worked well enough on the AML side, it was rigid and reactive for the fraud team. To compensate for the vendor’s shortcomings the fraud team also depended on a homegrown system that they extracted data and batches from to then digest in a Tableau dashboard.
“While nightly batches will work for AML because your intention is backward-looking, that’s just not sufficient when you are looking at P2P or account takeover fraud. Because of this, we were also reliant on a homegrown system that was unscalable and manual,” recalled Jonathan Pollock, Chief Risk Officer of Directions Credit Union.
TLDR: Problems
- Increased A2A, P2P, ATOs, and check fraud over the last 2-3 years
- Growth in fraud loss (excluding card fraud) amounting to $250,000–$300,000
- Legacy vendor lacked real-time fraud alerting, due to once-per-day, nightly batches
- Unscalable homegrown system also dependent on data extractions and batch uploads to Tableau
Direction’s existing system was not effective in detecting and preventing fraud in real time, leading to substantial fraud losses and operational inefficiencies.
WHY UNIT21
Unmatched adaptability empowers the team to find and act on new fraud patterns
After a decade of rigidity and inflexibility, Directions Credit Union knew it was time to make an upgrade. Jon evaluated five vendors with the goal of a single comprehensive platform for both BSA/AML and fraud.
“We needed a platform that was near real-time, customizable, and adaptable to the changing landscape of risk and compliance. Many of these vendors were for lack of a better word–a black box. You got what you got. With Unit21, I liked that I could create my own rules based on a new fraud pattern.“
Jon and his team found implementation easy and seamless. “The only hard part of the implementation was on us–finding all our data sources and giving that data to Unit21. The actual implementation was a breeze. It’s a fairly intuitive platform and a 2-day training with our fraud team was sufficient to get them up and running.”
TLDR: Why Unit21
- A single platform for AML and fraud
- Seamless and easy implementation with great customer support
- Intuitive platform–a 2-day training fully enabling the fraud team
