Inscribe enhances risk management for the finance industry

By Edlyn Cardoza

Inscribe, a leading FinTech solution for fraud detection and risk management, recently announced that it has released new features to help combat the $20B fraud losses faced by U.S. financial institutions. Banking, lending, and other FinTech businesses can use these AI-powered innovations to reduce risk exposure while granting financial access to more authentic customers and traditionally underserved communities.

“The shift to online banking and lending during the pandemic has created more opportunities for digital criminals. As a result, detecting fraud is a top priority for many financial services companies today. Instead of relying solely on manual reviews to establish the trustworthiness of applicants who are looking to open an account or a line of credit, we need to complement them with products that make use of technology to deliver more accurate, efficient, and scalable solutions, just like Inscribe,” said Karim Atiyeh, co-founder, and CTO of Ramp.

Inscribe’s own data shows that while, on average, 5% of all financial application documents submitted in an online channel are manipulated, that number more than doubled to 13% in 2020. The conventional approach to risk management for account opening relies on manual reviews to verify a consumer’s identity. But the unprecedented increase in fraud during the pandemic demonstrates that businesses must utilise more advanced, AI-powered methods and other data sources (like cash flow and transaction data) to authenticate their customers and analyse risk.

“We’ve absolutely seen the number of fraudulent documents and the level of sophistication within them go up over the past few years. The techniques that the finance industry used to rely on for keeping out bad actors have become less reliable, and simply making risk assessments more stringent has the potential to prevent authentic customers from accessing financial products,” said Ido Lustig, CEO of bizi and former Chief Risk Officer of BlueVine. “Modern businesses need a more accurate way to determine which customers they can trust, and Inscribe is leading the charge to solve this.”

Many of these businesses also need to look beyond asset-backed financing and credit scores, as this traditional approach excludes millions of consumers: one in five Americans (approximately 62 million) are considered “thin file” with fewer than five credit accounts, and 26 million Americans are “credit invisible” due to a lack of any credit history. These underserved communities have been hindered from accessing finances to prevent fraud, but the approach is outdated.

“Inscribe was founded on the idea that we can make a more fair and efficient financial services ecosystem, and for us that started with building best-in-class fraud detection to keep criminals from gaining access,” said Ronan Burke, Inscribe co-founder and CEO. “But ‘fairness’ also means giving access to people who deserve it, so we’ve expanded our risk management capabilities to help businesses reconceptualise how they evaluate who is trustworthy—providing more opportunity for true customers and underserved communities while still keeping their businesses safe.”

With these new, powerful features, including AI-powered image fraud detection, a secure document collection portal, and enhanced automation features (including OCR, data extraction, classification, and matching), Inscribe customers can reduce risk while saving time on document reviews. In addition, banks, lenders, and underwriters using Inscribe will be able to grant financial access to more authentic customers and underserved communities with a new credit analysis feature, which enables alternative ways for them to understand the potential risk of opening a line of credit while reducing reliance on credit scores and asset-backed financing.

All of this comes on the heels of tremendous growth from Inscribe. In addition to securing Series A funding in 2021, the company saw a more than 500% year-over-year increase in documents analysed. In 2022, Inscribe plans to expand on its mission of addressing emerging problems within the financial services industry.