The pandemic has been having a mammoth socio-economic impact on almost every conceivable aspect and the banking sector too has not been immune. The crisis has put certain critical aspects of the banking universe in the spotlight, including that of customer experience – a vital factor during extreme times. Imperative therefore to re-visit how customers’ digital experiences can be made frictionless during an exceptionally difficult phase.

Imagine an intelligent system that studies customers’ behavioral patterns to detect fraud, is also creating precise personas for the bank’s marketing teams to target campaigns to. The same real-time, context-aware logic/approach used to combat cross-channel fraud can also help enable intelligent, hyper-precise targeted and contextual customer engagements.

Challenger Banks have undoubtedly been a great idea as they have redefined banking with a brand-new model. But they cannot side-step the foundational principle, i.e. banking is a business of trust – something that can be impacted with just one unexpected incident. While their innovative customer-centric strategies make Challenger Banks agile and responsive, the rush to make customer onboarding fast and effortless also makes them more vulnerable to the growing threat of financial crimes.

A recent survey by the National Center for Public Opinion Surveys under the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue revealed that 62% of Saudis are exposed to attempts of financial fraud. About 28% of those who were exposed to financial fraud attempts said that there was a relationship between the financial fraud attempt they had been exposed to and a previous activity they had done.

Cut to the beginning of the last decade when the cheque began going through an existential crisis. With digital payments rapidly creating a cashless economy, the cheque has begun heading for the exit door. But there are vast populations that still rely on cheques for transferring funds, so a complete shift to a cashless / paperless economy & society is still a little away.

Given the response strategies to the COVID-19 pandemic implemented by federal, state and local governments globally, consumers’ behavioral changes during this phase, and Financial Institutions’ (FIs) staffing and mobility constraints, fraud prevention must be tackled in a different manner.

Loan fraud is impacting smaller banks, community banks and credit unions at twice the rate of larger counterparts. An innovative approach helps smaller financial institutions do more to detect fraud hidden in bad loans to reduce losses and increase approval rates.