About the Webinar

The Blueprint is Sift’s how-to series for fraud leaders who want practical guidance, not theory. Each session walks through a specific problem, with clear steps, tradeoffs, and examples from real companies.

Most fraud programs start with payment fraud, and for good reason. It is the fastest path to measurable loss. But teams that stop there often miss account takeover, fake account creation, and promo abuse until those problems show up in support tickets, chargeback disputes, or a spike in customer complaints. By the time it is visible, it has usually been costing the business for months.

In this session, Sift Trust and Safety Architect Maria Benjamin explains how to build a fraud strategy that covers the full customer lifecycle, not just the checkout page. Hosted by AppSec Training founder Jerry Hoff, this conversation covers where blind spots typically form, how to prioritize which fraud type to tackle next, and how to make the case for expanding coverage without inflating headcount.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How to identify which non-payment fraud types, including chargebacks, are quietly costing your business the most
  • How to sequence fraud program expansion so you are solving the highest-impact problem first, not the loudest one
  • How to build a business case for broader fraud coverage that connects to revenue, support costs, and customer trust

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Video Transcript

WEBVTT

1
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Jerry Hoff: Welcome back to the Blueprint Series! This episode is going to be how to solve for more than just payment fraud. It’s going to be an amazing 30 minutes.

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Jerry Hoff: I have my co-host today, Maria Benjamin. So, Maria is a trust and safety architect at SIFT, she’s worked at Venmo, she’s worked at StepMobile, and she now helps and advises organizations on how to operationalize fraud strategy. And it’s great to have you here. Maria, how you doing today?

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Maria Benjamin: Great! And I was like, we gotta change that name. Operationalize is so hard to say.

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Jerry Hoff: It is a bit of a tongue twister.

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Maria Benjamin: So…

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Jerry Hoff: This is gonna be very interesting, because I think a lot of organizations are really focused on the bottom line, right? They’re always focused on chargebacks, or things like that, like actual quantifiable currency, and so forth, but

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Jerry Hoff: We’re going to be talking today about all those other things that organizations might even be measuring, but they’re not utilizing in their fraud

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Jerry Hoff: prevention, Fraud Prevention Scheme. Would you agree with that, Maria?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, definitely. I’m excited about this one.

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Jerry Hoff: Me too, me too. So, let’s go through this slide, it’s very interesting. So these are all the potential losses that aren’t necessarily transactional. So, Maria, walk us through.

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, so of course this isn’t exhaustive, but this really thinks a lot about the different ways that you are still having to account for something that might not be monetary. So, referral programs, if you have points and giveaways, thinking about credits that are for bad experiences, maybe you’re giving away a free meal, but that idea of, like.

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Maria Benjamin: okay, what is that worth? It’s gonna have a monetary value, but it’s not necessarily going to, be a line item for chargeback, dispute, etc.

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Maria Benjamin: So thinking about automated acceptance and disputes, what’s the cost of doing business is often where this gets categorized as. And a points accumulation, you know, that flight that you take on points still has a value.

14
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Jerry Hoff: For me, it has a lot of value. I mean, do not mess with my airline points. Those are very… I would be very disheartened if those were suddenly, I guess, robbed from me. And we’re going to be going through this, but just kind of use the example of the airline points, Maria. Is it that those are being stolen, or they’re being accrued, they’re being transferred?

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Maria Benjamin: And there’s actually a couple ways that this can happen, so exactly like you’re thinking, like, somebody is, takes over your account, ATO, and they don’t actually use your credit cards. What they do is they spend that amount of points, and…

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Maria Benjamin: they take that trip to Amsterdam, they schedule it the next day. The company is out the cost of both the flight, but they’re also out the cost that they have to do to reimburse you, and even though that’s not a dollars that’s going to show up, it’s a thing that they’re going to need to compensate for. So that’s the traditionally thing through ATO, but you could also just have employee fraud, some places where people are accruing points that maybe

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Maria Benjamin: They shouldn’t be accruing, or gaming a system to, have them in the loyalty where they don’t really,

18
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Maria Benjamin: They haven’t really earned them themselves.

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Jerry Hoff: Makes sense, makes sense. When you show, when you show giveaways.

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Jerry Hoff: my mind goes back to the famous case where the gentleman, I believe it was with Pepsi.

21
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Jerry Hoff: Or was it McDonald’s? It was one of the two, but basically said, hey, you owe me a fighter jet, or a helicopter or something. Maria, do you remember.

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, I know, that’s funny, it’s very funny law case, where they… I think he ended up not getting the helicopter, but he was entitled to a bunch of the money or the monetary value of what it was worth, because he did collect that, what they thought was an unseemly amount. I want to say it was, like, a billion points or something like that, but he ended up doing it. So, right, exactly, like, you can’t make these big gestures and then think that, oh, people know it’s…

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Maria Benjamin: a joke. People are going to try and collect. So you need to be very careful around these kinds of giveaways, programs, think about if somebody’s going to reasonably win it, but also just who is going to get the prize itself, because a lot of times there is that employee fraud, or like, how… I think, was it McDonald’s Monopoly that had that problem where it was rigged for only certain people to win? And then this comes even to this

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Maria Benjamin: larger idea of governance, so maybe it wasn’t a loss to them in the way of who won, but it clearly became a loss driver when you think about what they ended up owing for all the legal fees, et cetera, that happened. So there’s lots of things to consider.

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Jerry Hoff: Lot of things to consider, and I bet most organizations are not thinking about that when they design these giveaways or referral programs or things like that, so… very interesting. I’d love to hear from… Maria and I would both love to hear from the participants on which loss vectors

26
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Jerry Hoff: is your organization most vulnerable to? So, just the exact same ones that we just went through, the referral programs, giveaways, or is it credit for poor experiences? And Maria, I guess that’s when people say, hey.

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Jerry Hoff: I, you know, my food got cold, you need to refund it to me, even though it wasn’t cold, and therefore, they’re technically, I guess, robbing inventory from the company. Is that about right?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. And…

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Maria Benjamin: I know I’ve had also customer service lines where people are like, I’ve been on hold for an hour, what are you gonna do for me? And sometimes they do issue credits, for that poor customer experience. So, the other thoughts, like, this obviously is an exhaustive list, and not all companies have all of these, but quite often they have some combination.

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Jerry Hoff: Yeah, yeah. The points one is really interesting, since you mentioned that in the event that there is points fraud, then the organization actually gets penalized twice, right? They have to put the points back, and then they have to pay for the, in this case, the flight that was… that was taken, so…

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Jerry Hoff: Pretty bad stuff. So, the results are in… wow, 64% said that referral… referral programs and giveaways were…

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Jerry Hoff: were the vector that they were most vulnerable to. And then we had another… the second runner-up was automatic acceptance of disputes without evidence.

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Jerry Hoff: Wow, so those were the two big ones. Very interesting, very interesting.

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Jerry Hoff: So, general patterns. I see the two big chunks here, and I know the slides are going to be, kind of getting into them, but

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Jerry Hoff: How do we kind of visualize or conceptualize these big common patterns, Maria?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, so this is where I think about your programs running together, and this is actually one of the first slides I show people when I’m walking through their, risk or fraud strategy. So, we’re thinking… so fraud would be the specific stolen financial, but risk entitles a lot of things, or the big trust and safety, architecture. And so, you’re looking at sanctioned entities. Usually, you think about this as being owned by compliance.

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Maria Benjamin: Where you’re talking about

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Maria Benjamin: do you have bad banks? Do you have bad countries? Do you have individuals that you don’t want there? Like, these are the ones that are going to be regulatory and required. And it looks so simple when you’re like, alright, so we’ll have a bucket of rules for compliance, then we come over here and we’ve got another bucket for, do we want to talk about creating multiple accounts, where those kind of points and referrals are going to come into play. At what point do you go, alright, Maria, you can only have

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Maria Benjamin: three Netflix accounts that you keep signing up for a free week, and how are we going to track those down? So that’s kind of this bucket here of the same IP, same or similar email, what are we doing with the VPN proxy? And then we think about this other kind of, like, do we have unusual velocity patterns? I know this is showing a lot of, payment stuff, where, like, do we have many withdrawals? Do we have many deposits?

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Maria Benjamin: Are we thinking about crypto or, other kinds of purchases? And this might sound particularly neobanking, but velocity happens in lots of different accounts and ways, but these are easy ways for people to think about, like, I added a bunch of money, and then I took a bunch out, and it came in from one account and went to a different one.

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Maria Benjamin: And then you’ve got other just high-risk signals when you think about, are you failing transactions? How often does that happen? Are there many unique payment methods? So, I kind of help orchestrate a large portion of these when I think about what is your business goal, and that’s where we tend to start with for customers, because, as we’ll see in our example in the next one, some of these get mixed up.

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Maria Benjamin: So you can think about your sanctioned entities. So, we’ll go with North Korea for this example. You might say, alright, we’re gonna block North Korea because we’re not supposed to be doing business there. That might be a fully compliance, pattern. But then if we think about this later, on our next slide, be like, alright, this person’s making multiple accounts. These accounts are underneath a…

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Maria Benjamin: normal fake name, like Hello Kitty. We’re like, okay, this… Hello Kitty’s not really signing up for an account with us, but is that Hello Kitty disguising…

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Maria Benjamin: Jerry trying to make yet another Netflix account, or is it actually, obscuring Jerry, who’s actually a leader of a terrorist organization, or in a sanctioned country? So those are things where, alright, is this a compliance rule, or is this a fraud rule now?

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Jerry Hoff: really something.

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Maria Benjamin: that you still want to cover for your business.

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Jerry Hoff: Absolutely, and then I guess the same with unusual velocity pattern. That might be something that’s only visible maybe to the IT staff, right? So that’s just yet another, another signal that’s coming into the organization. Maybe walk us through that a little bit, if you don’t mind.

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, so thinking about, with the unusual velocity, I know we talked about, like, cards here, but maybe through the bank and VIN, you’re able to say, like, alright, I can now understand that

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Maria Benjamin: this is from a country that maybe we do or don’t want to do business with. Does it make sense for my business? Obviously, right now, Russia is a sanctioned entity, but you could also say somebody on the border were like, alright, I’m actually a US-based country, do I really want to accept cards from China?

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Jerry Hoff: Mmm.

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Maria Benjamin: And then that’s not really a compliance problem, but in the… it’s a little different for fraud versus cybersecurity, is that for us, we’re thinking about, oh, I want everybody’s money that I can have. All money is a… like, a good… every dollar’s a good dollar, but that might not necessarily be true when you’re thinking.

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Maria Benjamin: is it gonna come back for a dispute? What is my, remittance here? What are my plans if something happens? What’s the likelihood that this card is from somebody who really wants to transact on my platform, or is trying to do some other nefarious activity? Maybe they’re selling that account to somebody else to use.

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Jerry Hoff: You know, we spoke about this a while back, and in cybersecurity and in security in general, there is this principle of least privilege. So, in this case, for example, you mentioned China, so if you are… let’s say you are U.S. domestic only, you don’t have any customers outside of the U.S, then, Maria, it would be best practice

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Jerry Hoff: to prohibit credit card transactions or credit cards from anybody living outside the United States.

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Jerry Hoff: You wouldn’t want to keep that on, like, well, just in case we change our minds in the future, we should leave it open. No, it should be locked down. Is that a great… is that the right way to think about it?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, that’s a great way to think about it, and then the little sliver that you’re gonna have to potentially think about doing enhanced assessment on is like, alright, has somebody traveled from China to the United States, and now I want to maybe do some additional verification to ensure that this transaction, or, like I said, this account, these user reward points are something that we want to

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Maria Benjamin: have…

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Jerry Hoff: Interesting, interesting. And then, some other high… I guess we kind of already talked about this, blocking countries that don’t make sense for your business. Apologies, I… I want to… I got too excited, I went a little bit ahead.

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Maria Benjamin: I was like, well, these trace back to the beginning, right? Where,

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Maria Benjamin: all of your rules, everything that you set up, be it if it’s going to be with Referral Fraud for marketing, or if you’re thinking about, sanctioned entities for compliance, the big thing is you’re thinking, like, what makes sense for the business? And making sure we’re not actually siloing these rules, because then you might have stuff that overlaps.

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Maria Benjamin: In this, for instance, fraud might be like, we’re just gonna block everything outside of, the United States. Well then, compliance doesn’t need a rule that says we’re looking for anyone who is North Korea, right? We just need to think about, like, the business collectively, so you can reduce redundancies.

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Maria Benjamin: But then you can also think through, are we all in alignment of what should be happening? Because if, cybersecurity isn’t blocking IPs from outside the United States, then you’re going to have a gap.

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Jerry Hoff: You know, that silo problem is hard. So, obviously, my background is cybersecurity, and I’ve dealt with this quite a bit, and

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Jerry Hoff: To your point.

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Jerry Hoff: I would assume that marketing, when they’re putting together some giveaway program, they need to somehow have that communication line back with

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Jerry Hoff: Fraud… the Fraud analysts so that that can be monitored, right? The same with the points, the same with all the other things that we’ve just gone through, right? IT needs to be doing that as well, along with cybersecurity, so it’s very interesting

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Jerry Hoff: And it’s very hard, I think the larger you are, the larger the company, the harder those conversations are to have, because a lot of folks don’t even know that they need to be going and checking with fraud. Is that right?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, I’ve definitely seen companies where the marketing team launches something, especially in that referral area, where, like, wow, look at all of these new customers we got, this has been a really effective program, and then the fraud team over here has been like, we have been closing down accounts for…

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Maria Benjamin: Hours and hours of people trying to get the bonus, the referral, and they’re like, can we please just turn the referral off?

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Maria Benjamin: And that’s where we have to start thinking of, like, are fraud, and marketing trying to fight, or product and fraud trying to fight? That’s not what we want here. We want them to swim together towards, like, a business goal, which is, like, was just sign-ups the correct KPI? Or are we thinking LTV, lifetime to value the customer? Are we thinking about, have they done enough for this threshold? Because Fraud isn’t there to just be like, no.

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Maria Benjamin: you can’t do that, that’s bad. They’re thinking about, alright, how… I want our business to succeed, too.

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Maria Benjamin: And thinking about ones that can be aligned for both teams.

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Jerry Hoff: Precisely. It’s just like in cybersecurity. You don’t want to be the Department of No, because then, obviously, the company can’t grow, right? You can’t innovate and so forth, and that is so interesting that fraud is the same way. Wow.

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Jerry Hoff: So, we have another question for our audience. Which team?

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Jerry Hoff: is your organization’s first line of fraud defense. Brand risk, compliance, customer service, disputes, or fraud. Maria, are there other, kind of, less popular, or what is, like, the most

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Jerry Hoff: I guess, memorable group that’s not in this list that you’ve seen that was the front… the first line of fraud defense for an organization?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, one of the funniest ones I mentioned before is actually marketing, because they’re really concerned, about being like, oh, we want to make sure our program is really buttoned up, and that we’re getting these, like, really high-value customers, so they were the ones doing a lot of vetting. That was, like, very interesting for me. It’s unusual, usually you’d want to stick to one of these other teams, because it’s a core competency, but that was a very interesting one.

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Jerry Hoff: That is interesting. So, the question was, hey, who does the first line of fraud defense? Well, it’s marketing, actually, but that kind of makes sense in some way. Very interesting. Out of curiosity, fraud, does it normally report up to the CFO? Does it report to the CEO? Does it report into… who does it report to? I guess, is it anybody?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, it can be lots of places, and that’s actually even where this first starts,

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Maria Benjamin: like, when, let’s see, I reported into Financial Crimes, which is the own department, but then I’ve also been other places where I reported to the chief financial officer. That’s very common, because they’re very concerned about, like, chargebacks, and disputes. And then I’ve also been, I’ve seen it in customer service, where it’s the chief operating officer is the one.

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Maria Benjamin: Those are more of the common areas, but they can be all over the place. Even cybersecurity is one of the ones I’ve seen fraud get…

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Jerry Hoff: Hey, that works for me. Actually, the more I learn about fraud, the more I think, yeah, these two… these two functions should be, working very closely together. So, we got back our poll results, and the majority, the vast majority, actually, the first offense

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Jerry Hoff: the first line of defense of fraud defense is fraud. And that’s what we would expect, right, Maria? That’s where it probably should… it should be.

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Maria Benjamin: That’s where it should live, yeah.

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Jerry Hoff: Yeah, we had… the second runner-up was compliance, which also makes sense.

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Jerry Hoff: So, it’s interesting, this, because it’s like a funnel of, I guess, mitigating risk and mitigating fraud, starting with brand risk. Maria, if you could, walk us through this sequence.

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, and this is how I kind of recommend thinking about it, but you can technically put these in any order. You could say maybe customer service is the one that you’re talking about first, because that’s the experience you’re caring most about. But I usually sequence it like this when I talk through it, because we’re thinking about

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Maria Benjamin: what is your biggest loss impact to your business? So, brand risk, that’s usually what I want to think about, is like, maybe you’re giving some credits that Fraud doesn’t want to do, or maybe you’re doing something that, like, the legal team says, hey, let’s do this best, for our brand in the long term, not if it’s right or wrong. And so that’s where I think about brand risk as being that one thing where, like.

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Maria Benjamin: If something falls into this category, we’re gonna do, like, a block, and we’re not gonna even bother with any of their other problems. So if they have, like, multi-problems, this is where you think about it, but, alright, are we getting rid of somebody for brand risk? Great. Not in USA? Sorry, you can’t play in our sandbox. Then after that, I think about compliance things, so that’s kind of the double, like, the circle within the circle is, like, if you’re not in the US, great.

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Maria Benjamin: It doesn’t matter because, if you’re in Russia, because you will also be blocked anyway. But that’s the next layer of thinking, alright, brand, then we’re thinking compliance, so we’re thinking of those regulatory rules, we’re covering,

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Maria Benjamin: all those areas that, per instance of infringement, can then cause, a lot of issues. As fraud, maybe you’re dealing with the one chargeback. Maybe you’re dealing with the $1,000 Gucci bag. But with compliance, it’d be like, for every instance of every potential violation, then you’re actually getting, an additional cost every single time. So that’s where I’m thinking brand risk, large one for your business.

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Maria Benjamin: compliance, you can get shut down if you’re not following these, or it can be very, very hefty fines. Then we’re thinking fraud, where, I like to put it in the middle here, because that’s the idea of, yup, somebody’s lost the value for that large Gucci bag. You can have, business ending amount of loss, and that’s what you really want to think about here. And then disputes, goes along with fraud. Fraud’s a predictor.

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Maria Benjamin: disputes is going to be getting the money back on the back end, and then customer service. So thinking a little bit about rules for policy, where you just say, hey, we’re not going to accept these credits because you have a low LTV, or you’ve been mean to people in our customer service team, so we’re not going to allow you to transact. So there’s ones where you can put these in any order, but I usually think about, alright, if you’re going to ban somebody from compliance, they don’t even need to get to the fraud team.

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Maria Benjamin: a band for, brand risk, they don’t need to get to the customer service credits.

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Jerry Hoff: That makes a lot of sense. Logistically, how do organizations

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Jerry Hoff: put all this together, they call you in, and then you kind of chair these… because I’m imagining you need representatives from customer service, you need representatives from the business, you need representatives from legal, you need representatives from compliance, you need representatives from, you know, the brand, whoever owns the brand. I mean, you need

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Jerry Hoff: a lot of people in the room, so that you can make sure that you don’t have gaps, and you don’t have too much overlap, right, to make a seamless fraud detection program.

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Jerry Hoff: Is that li- you know, is that…

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Jerry Hoff: How do companies normally do that? What is the mechanism?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, so I was like, at the onset, usually you do have kind of a representative from everybody in the room, and then… and that’s kind of, like, the establishing part of, like, alright, we’re onboarding SIFT, here’s all the things we’re thinking about, and so you’ll usually work with the main owner, so, like, the person who’s in charge of the fraud team, but then in that setup, you’ll be having all these, alright, has, Treasury had their

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Maria Benjamin: talk through on what’s happening here. I’ve even had opportunities with, franchisees, because it was, like, food service, so they want to say, because they’re like, this is also my business. So usually you start at this kind of, like, big level of, like, what’s the strategy, what we’re planning on, what we’re covering, and then from there, it kind of falls away, where the, most closely held teams end up helping, like, alright, I’ll talk

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Maria Benjamin: to compliance if we need to add something in. So you… I’ve seen, like, Treasury and cybersecurity be the owners, and they’ll jointly be there, or it’ll just be, like, the fraud team, and be like, alright, I cross-functionally meet with those people, but the first one is a large cross-functional, and then after that, you kind of get focused on what are we having fraud… sorry, what are we having the Fraud Team do specifically, or what are we having SIFT work

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Maria Benjamin: on specifically, and then what are the little branches from there?

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Jerry Hoff: Interesting, interesting.

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Jerry Hoff: Yeah, that must be a fun meeting, right? Because you must start with the fraud, and then you kind of work down to everybody’s responsibility. You collect requirements and all sorts of logistical

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Jerry Hoff: issues. Wow, that’s… that sounds fun, that sounds fun.

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Jerry Hoff: So, when to add headcount, or when to shift tactics. Maria, do you feel that most organizations don’t have enough staff? Do they not have the right tools? What are usually the good and the bad and the ugly that you see in terms of headcount and tactics?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, I’d say this is kind of, you tend to see two problems. You’re either going to see people who, have…

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Maria Benjamin: This isn’t their core competency, and they haven’t really invested that time, so they’re maybe making bad calls or a little confused.

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Maria Benjamin: Or you have things where people are just underwater and they don’t have the time, where you’re like, oh, I’d love to if I had the time to do this, but I’ve got all these other things. So when I think about, like, the scale, or even, who your fraud team is, and the overlap here, is you want to make sure that you’re thinking about maybe potentially adding headcount, or shifting, like you said, your tactics here, adding in something, I know we do machine

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Maria Benjamin: learning, but you want a scaling solution. So if you’re spending 60% of your time, doing something that is your core competency, that’s when you need to start really thinking about if you want to add something, either a person or a process, because then you’re spending basically almost half of your time actually doing what you’re supposed to, which is

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Maria Benjamin: Fraud prevention, in this example. In a more practical way, I remember at one of the companies I was at, we just had so many disputes coming in, the team was super-duper underwater, so they had the fraud team doing disputes, which I was spending, like, 3 out of the 4 weeks in a month doing disputes, and I was like, okay, great, I’m doing all this stuff, but it wasn’t a core competency of what you want me here to do.

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Maria Benjamin: And then also, fraud agents sometimes make bad disputes agents, because in fraud, if somebody lies to you, i.e. sends you a doctor document, or, tells you something that’s incorrect, you ban them. You’re always like, great!

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Maria Benjamin: off the platform, but in disputes, if somebody’s just trying to get their money back, you’re usually like, nice try, I’m denying your dispute to get to be here. So we did see this trend of.

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Maria Benjamin: Dis… a lot of disputed transactions getting also a ban, which people realized later was like, maybe that’s not the best use of our time,

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Maria Benjamin: Or our capabilities here. So that’s what I think about, do we then add a new tool in to take over, or do we add headcount, for that specialized area?

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Jerry Hoff: This sounds like one of those situations, and again, I always relate back to security, but very similar. I would always look for, okay, how do we change the process? How do we change the tactics so that we don’t get overburdened with a bunch of manual work?

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Jerry Hoff: And especially fraud, it is something that really can be quantified, right? So, cybersecurity, it’s often kind of fuzzy risk, like, when you’re lowering it, but when you’re lowering fraud, there’s usually a very clear correlation to ROI.

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Jerry Hoff: So, I would imagine…

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Jerry Hoff: using as many signals as you can. You’d mentioned the machine learning, right? Pulling that data in, using all the signals that you have, and then

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Jerry Hoff: getting that, that fraud number down as much as possible without causing unnecessary friction, that sounds like the sweet spot. Is that right, Maria?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to be like, change everything with AI, I’m more just like, you want to make sure you have your core team, and then you help unlock their, growth there. So you don’t want to have… you’re going to 1 to a million in customers, you can’t scale with 1 to 1 to 1 to 1. You’re going to need one to 100, 1 to 1,000, when you’re talking about transactions.

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Jerry Hoff: That makes sense. And you always need your experts, always, always, always, but you definitely need a process as well. Very interesting. So this is an interesting slide as well, this overlap between compliance and fraud, and I’m sure there’s a lot. What is the, what are the highlights of this slide, Maria, that we should be looking at?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, and this is just what I was kind of mentioned before, is you want to keep people to their core competencies, because fraud will pick up things for compliance. They might say, oh, I gotta send this over to compliance team, because they’re verifying customers, looking at misuse on the platform, but if somebody needs to do a SAR report, you’re like, that should… this is vicious activity report, that should go straight to compliance. Fraud shouldn’t really be dealing with it, other than the idea that they know to escalate it.

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Jerry Hoff: Makes sense to me, makes sense to me. And then disputes and fraud, same thing, that…

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, very similar. You’re gonna have high overlaps, you’re gonna see people are doing it. I know I did disputes, but, same idea. It’s like, you want to make sure that they’re keeping money in the platform, but you’re gonna wanna make sure that Disputes is handling, what they need to.

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Jerry Hoff: Nice, nice, nice. Well, we are kind of coming up to time, so maybe we can just look at this slide very quickly, and I think, Maria, what you were telling me before is that this slide kind of gives evidence that if a customer experienced fraud with a particular organization, they’re very

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Jerry Hoff: they’re much less likely to stay on that platform, is that right?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, and this is why, if you’re thinking, well, why did I sequence brand risk at the top? This kind of is why. When you think about, hey, if I experience fraud on the platform, and we’re gonna, like, risk in general, if you’re thinking about that, people will say, hey, depending on how the company handles this.

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Maria Benjamin: is going to determine how I’m going to move forward. Am I going to stop using it or not? And you even see people who experience a little bit of fraud at all are just like, I’m done, stop being on the platform at 27%. I think that’s very, very interesting. You can see, like, most of them are… most people are leaning into those buckets of, I trust it less, or I don’t want to use it, or I’m really going to think about it next time.

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Maria Benjamin: And that erosion of trust is so hard to get back.

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Jerry Hoff: That makes sense to me, and that’s what I would do as well. I’m like, hey, I got frauded with you, I’m not gonna come back. So, real quickly, for those of folks who are attending this, you’re gonna be receiving an email for a free digital risk assessment, and you’re gonna have the link, take it, and you’re gonna find out

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Jerry Hoff: What, Maria, they’re gonna find out, essentially, how they’re managing fraud and risk, and they’re gonna get some feedback and some advice, is that correct?

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Maria Benjamin: Yeah, exactly, and they kind of see what level they’re, like, growth stage, what should you be focusing on, that kind of thing.

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Jerry Hoff: Wonderful, wonderful. I encourage everybody to do that, and thank you all very much for joining the presentation. We look forward to having you back at the next Blueprint series, and Maria, thank you so much, and thanks to Keaton, who works in the back and helps all these things be possible. So thank you all very much, and have a wonderful rest of the day.

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Maria Benjamin: Thank you.