Florida credit union overhauls its fraud prevention with big assist from AI
American Banker
May 6, 2022
As algorithmic techniques for fraud prevention improve, financial institutions have more and better options to stop losses in real time rather than try to recover funds hours or days after the fact.
Rather than rely on tellers to identify whether a check is fraudulent or a wire transfer is authorized, credit unions and community banks increasingly identify and prevent fraud with machine learning, but some still lag. For institutions that make the leap into real-time fraud prevention, the gains can be major.
That was the case for Launch Credit Union, which serves a six-county area on the Atlantic coast of central Florida, and switched to a real-time solution at the end of 2020. The credit union’s chief financial officer claims it reduced fraudulent transactions across its 16 locations by 97% after purchasing the product, saving $1.8 million in 2021.
"Fraud prevention that uses artificial intelligence can be thought of as a means of superpowering fraud teams — acting as a force multiplier," according to Greg Woolf, FiVerity’s CEO.