In financial services, KM is a plus

KM helps prevent fraud

Along with helping clients secure their financial future, as financial advisers do, knowledge management is also critical in helping protect a person’s and a financial institution’s financial assets from increasing incidents of fraud.

Such is the case for Axcess Financial, a financial services company that provides installment and payday loans through its 1,000 storefront locations and contact centers. The financial services company was looking for ways to help ensure its compliance with federal regulations (such as do-not-call requests) and ensuring quality control, says Allyson Keown, speech analytics analyst at Axcess Financial. If the solution could also provide better fraud detection, it would be a nice additional benefit.

 As fraudsters look for the path of least resistance to access funds, one target has been lenders such as Axcess Financial, Keown says. Fraudsters would call in pretending to be from the corporate office or a human resources department, saying that a mistake had been made on a transaction, then would request a new transaction to be processed, enabling them to get away with the additional funds. 

The CallMiner Eureka tool had shown it could provide the better quality control that Axcess Financial sought, so the company installed the tool in June 2017. But when Axcess was asked to identify fraud, the company wasn’t sure what that looked like, how it operated or how it would present itself (if at all) within the Eureka tool, which detects words fraudsters tend to use and identifies suspect phone numbers.

Keown took a few call samples and some feedback from associates who had been successfully scammed and turned that into the fraud detection model.

According to Keown, fraud detection (for Axcess) is truly a “cherry on top” benefit of the system—and far more successful than they ever imagined—but not their primary motivation for purchasing the software.

 Keown expects to continue training agents on the use of Eureka to improve the fraud detection rates.

KM helps connect with customers

As Kern Schools Federal Credit Union grew to $1.4 billion in assets, many aspects of the financial institution changed, from the addition of the internet and mobile banking to new products and services, but one item that hadn’t changed for several years was the telephone system, says Shonna Shearson, VP of the credit union’s contact center and training.

“We were well overdue for a phone overhaul, so we looked at some different systems,” Shearson says, with the search starting late in 2016. The old system lacked good connection with the credit union’s core processor and could only provide limited knowledge about a caller, both inefficient in today’s financial services industry.

Kern adopted the Genesys PureConnect platform to better connect with customers and to manage teams. Kern installed the on-premise version of the platform (a cloud version is also available), going live in August 2017. The platform provides contact center agents with a screen pop that includes essential customer information, like account details, upon calling.

PureConnect also provides multichannel routing—phone, email, chat, digital channels and skills-based routing, as well as screenshare and video and co-browsing—enabling quicker connections to specialists for credit card, stop check or other specialty needs. That results in better member service, according to Shearson.

“Our core value is to be member-focused. PureConnect helps us do that,” Shearson says. “It’s had a huge impact on member service and the member experience. We’re not spending time relearning all of the members’ information.”

Another PureConnect benefit, according to Shearson, is fraud prevention. “We have a lot more information about where a person is calling from,” she says. If a person is calling from outside of the normal calling area or calls back multiple times to try to get additional account information (often used for social engineering), that’s good evidence of a fraud attempt.

The credit union is in the process of integrating PureConnect with a new core processing system, which will provide agents with ready access to more customer data. The credit union also hopes to incorporate voice recognition to enable quick customer identification and more self-service capabilities.

The use of knowledge management tools for financial services firms continues to grow and change with the industry itself. So financial services providers will continue relying on a variety of knowledge management solutions to help meet needs for financial behavior analysis, fraud detection and improved customer service as well as to help provide better efficiencies in other areas of the business.