August 9

Dealing with credit card disputes can be a time-consuming and expensive process for banks (especially as chargeback fraud is on the rise), but automation software promises to increase operational efficiency and reduce losses.  

$187 billion asset KeyBank has tapped fintech Quavo to unify and add automation to its fraud and dispute process, with the software replacing many of the manual tasks bank employees previously had to complete, from claim intake and investigation through resolution. 

“We anticipate our back-office hand-offs and processes will reduce in half while improving chargeback effectiveness,” a KeyBank spokesperson told Insights Distilled, adding that Quavo’s platform “takes out errors and manual processes, giving us capacity to provide more support to our clients and dispute investigations.” 

With bad actors offering professionalized phishing-as-a-service software to dupe customers into giving up their credentials, the need for comprehensive customer education is more dire than ever. 

Criminals can pay as little as $50 a month to run a realistic-looking Wells Fargo website that includes 24/7 support, according to a report from IronNet, which recently uncovered a large-scale phishing-as-a-service scheme by a platform called Robin Banks. Robin Banks sells access to “phishing kits” that let bad actors easily imitate the likes of Wells Fargo, Citi, and Bank of America, in order to steal customers’ credentials. Bad actors using the kits have stolen at least $500,000 from victims, according to the researchers. 

While it stands out for its slick, professionalized toolkits, Robin Banks is just one example of a much larger problem: A record 1,025,968 phishing attacks occurred globally in Q1, surpassing 1 million incidents in a single quarter for the first time, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.  

“Customer education is the most important way of mitigating these types of attacks,” IronNet threat intelligence analyst Morgan Demboski told Insights Distilled. Banks need to “properly warn customers of the possibility of being targeted” and educate them on how to spot fraudulent emails, texts, phone calls, and websites. 

Software that tracks governance risk in real-time can both improve executive decision making and reduce audit failures, which in turn cuts down on reputational damage and fines. 

A Fortune 500 financial institution recently refreshed its governance process: In a matter of weeks, it went from manually managing its compliance program in Word Docs and Excel spreadsheets, which were instantly out of date, to adopting RegScale’s API-powered automation platform. RegScale serves as a compliance system of record, integrates with the firm’s security tooling (in this case, Wiz, an Insight Partners portfolio company), maps information to compliance requirements, automatically creates necessary tickets, and spits out audit-ready documentation. 

“[The firm] now visualize their compliance and risk posture in real-time, for their board and decision makers,” RegScale CEO Anil Karmel told Insights Distilled. “The first reaction is, ‘It’s too good to be true.’” 

The new system saves time and reduces human error, while also providing a more accurate understanding of current risk.  

“It’s transforming the culture of compliance to be real-time, continuous, and complete,” Karmel said. 

RegScale just announced $20 million in fresh funding. 

Trade finance has traditionally been a highly manual, paper-based process with multiple checkpoints – making it ripe for digitization, automated classification, data extraction, and machine-learning powered accuracy checks.  

Deutsche Bank just announced that it’s further integrating with Traydstream, a platform that digitizes and extracts data from trade finance documents to automatically check for errors and validate them against global trade and compliance rules.  

Deutsche Bank first started working with Traydstream in 2021 and the deepened partnership is “a further endorsement for automated document checks as a key enabler for the digitization of documentary trade products,” according to Deutsche Bank trade finance lead Claudia Hussy.  

Traydstream says it can slash document checking time from hours to minutes, leading to a potential cost reduction of ~60% over human processing. 

As swamped compliance teams struggle to keep up with the rapid influx of regulatory documents and enforcement actions, AI-powered software that scans, synthesizes, and provides recommendations can improve productivity and reduce errors. 

Compliance.ai monitors sources of new regulation, uses machine learning to highlight the changes that are relevant to a given financial institution, and automatically routes documents to the right internal experts. 

“It’s about simplifying the workflow,” CEO Asif Alam told Insights Distilled. “We can be the ‘network orchestrator’ within these large organizations, allowing the office of the Chief Compliance Officer to easily connect the dots in their organization.” 

A study the firm conducted with 10 compliance teams showed that its software reduced the volume of documents that needed manual processing from an average of 25,537 down to 585, which it estimates would save compliance teams an average of 87 days of work every 6 months.

Compliance.ai targets mid-size banks, large asset-management firms, and insurance companies, and just raised $6 million.