Banks are getting better at making digital account opening faster, easier and more efficient. But improvements to reduce the friction for customers can also open the door to new ways of gumming up the works with fraud.
According to Aite Group, new account fraud rates in the online channel are “eight times that of accounts opened in the branch.” With Aite projecting that digital and mobile demand deposit account applications will represent 45 percent of total account opening volume by 2020, it’s critical that banks have multilayered methods of fraud screening.
One of the reasons NAF losses soared from $3 billion in 2017 to $3.4 billion in 2018, according to Javelin, is that many banks are not screening for out-of-pattern behaviors that only become evident when combining identity attributes with other data elements: otherwise hidden insights from phones, addresses and emails, for example.
Without integrating these data elements, fraudsters have the advantage. Because they have access to compromised data, their applications can look completely legitimate to traditional ID verification systems. If the applicant name, Social Security and mailing address match credit header data, then fraudsters can bypass the system.