Think of it as Shark Tank with a credit union spin, and it’s just been renewed for another season.
The 2024 Innovation Series from CreditUnions.com and Callahan & Associates is underway. Every year since 2018, this series has offered a select group of suppliers 10 minutes each to impress an audience of credit union decision-makers. It’s simple: Each vendor pitches its offerings and attendees vote on their favorites.
The Innovation Series was a hit from the get-go and continues to grow in popularity. This year’s focus areas include member analytics, fraud, lending, member experience, and payments.
Read on for more from this year’s Fraud finalists: Pindrop, Abrigo, Illuma and make sure to join us for the Innovations In Fraud webinar. Register Today!
Abrigo
Describe your innovation.
Abrigo Fraud Detection finds more fraud faster. The solution helps community financial institutions rapidly identify fraudulent transactions and significantly reduce fraud loss. It leverages AI to automate and streamline workflows to help institutions prioritize truly suspicious activities and increase efficiency. Abrigo Fraud Detection enables fraud teams to make swift and accurate decisions to better protect credit unions’ assets and members, fostering trust and loyalty.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Abrigo Fraud Detection will:
- Enable credit unions to leverage the same advanced technology used by many of the largest financial institutions, enhancing their fraud prevention capabilities to safeguard customer assets and strengthen their brand.
- Minimize burdensome manual processing that increases operational costs and is insufficient against sophisticated fraudsters.
- Reduce fraud losses that can impact the credit union’s ability to invest in growth initiatives.
- Bridge the gap between the AML & Fraud teams’ disjointed efforts to synchronize financial crime prevention and comply with FinCEN’s national AML/CFT priorities.
How does it increase member value?
Adopting the Abrigo Fraud Detection solution demonstrates a credit union’s commitment to maintaining a safe banking environment and protecting its members’ assets. This commitment not only builds trust among members but also enhances the institution’s reputation as a safe haven for financial transactions.
Effective fraud detection measures minimize the impact of potential financial loss and streamlines the member experience by reducing the inconvenience caused by fraudulent transactions. This assurance translates into stronger member loyalty and satisfaction, as individuals feel secure entrusting their financial needs to the credit union.
Enabling AI-powered fraud detection capabilities empowers credit unions to explore innovative service offerings that cater to evolving customer preferences. For instance, embracing instant payment services like FedNow becomes feasible and safer, enabling credit unions to remain competitive and attract members seeking real-time payment solutions.
Moreover, the efficiencies gained from mitigating fraud losses serve as valuable resources that can be reinvested into member-centric initiatives. Whether it is enhancing digital banking experiences or spearheading impactful community outreach programs, these initiatives bolster member engagement and satisfaction while fostering stronger ties within the community.
By partnering with Abrigo, credit unions not only fortify their financial security but also unlock opportunities for sustainable growth in today’s competitive landscape. As credit unions implement growth-oriented strategies and solidify their market presence, they attract new members, thereby perpetuating a cycle of growth, competitiveness, and success within the industry.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Disjointed and manual fraud detection methods, including reliance on Excel spreadsheets, expose credit unions to sophisticated fraudsters. Unlike many competitors, Abrigo’s new fraud detection software enhances protection by automating end-to-end workflows and leveraging AI, significantly reducing fraud exposure. Integrated seamlessly with your data sources, Abrigo Fraud Detection can complement BAM+ for anti-money laundering or operate as a standalone fraud solution. It provides comprehensive protection against fraudsters exploiting weak systems, empowering credit unions to identify and mitigate risks effectively.
Abrigo Fraud Detection leverages Mitek’s Check Fraud Defender, a nationwide consortium of check fraud data, powerful AI and ML image analysis, and Abrigo’s configurable fraud decision engine to pinpoint a higher rate of altered items, forgeries, and fraudulent checks. Tailored to each institution’s needs, the Abrigo platform automates processes and streamlines workflows to increase efficiency and prioritize higher-risk activities.
Flexible step-up authentication enhances security without compromising user experience. Additionally, Abrigo offers fraud reporting for tracking trends and monitoring analyst performance. This delivers actionable insights so you can optimize processes and make data-driven decisions.
In a pilot program with a U.S. institution, Abrigo Fraud Detection correctly identified 93% of the institution’s total fraudulent check value, equating to more than $330,000 in potential fraud loss avoidance. With Abrigo, you can find fraud faster, more accurate decisions, prioritize security, and enhance member satisfaction.
Illuma
Describe your innovation.
At the 2024 innovation series, we will showcase Illuma’s current and future innovations to protect credit unions and their members against voice clone attacks targeting contact centers. Our innovations help ensure banking over the phone remains easy, convenient, efficient, and secure.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
With the growth and popularity of Generative AI, there are now a number of readily available tools that can create synthetic voices (aka voice clones or deepfakes) with ease. Credit unions and their members are rightfully concerned about such voice cloning tools being used by bad actors to commit fraud and execute account takeovers via a simple phone call to an unsuspecting contact center agent. The innovations we will present at the 2024 Innovation Series are designed to address these threats.
How does it increase member value?
Members frequently voice their concerns about voice clones and the impact on security of contact center transactions. The innovations from Illuma will put members’ minds at ease knowing they can continue to enjoy convenient, efficient, and secure phone banking at their credit union.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Illuma is the first and only CUSO specializing in the area of voice authentication and fraud prevention for credit union contact centers. We have an unwavering focus on the needs and use cases prevalent in the credit union industry. Unlike competing solutions that are costly and difficult to deploy, our targeted effort has resulted in solutions that are ‘right sized’ for credit unions that need a quick, budget-friendly way to improve member experience, operational efficiency, and account security.
Pindrop
Describe your innovation.
Pindrop is a consistent leader in contact center authentication, security and intelligence, and has been conducting advanced deepfake research for the last 8 years. Due to the recent rise of generative AI and deepfake attacks, we brought our innovation to the forefront to provide our customers with protection against deepfake voice fraud. That’s why we’ve extended our intelligence platform and developed a Liveness detection engine, Pindrop Pulse, to determine in real-time if the audio on the call coming into a contact center belongs to a real human or is synthetically generated. With this new feature that can be added on to our existing authentication and fraud detection solutions, we analyze spectro-temporal audio features and provide a liveness score on top of risk and authentication scores, that provide further confidence to the contact center to decide whether or not to authenticate the caller. This liveness feedback removes the risk of agent errors and prevents hyper-realistic audio from skating past an authentication system. Pindrop Pulse has been purpose-built for audio deepfake detection with a robust Deep Neural Network (DNN) based machine learning model that has been trained with over 20 million voice samples and over 120 Text-to-Speech (TTS) engines. As a result, Pindrop Pulse has a 99% deepfake detection rate based on existing deepfake models. It can even detect 90% of zero-day attacks, meaning that even before we train our technology on a new TTS engine or voice cloning software, 9 out of 10 times, we can still detect an attack that utilizes those systems.
What opportunity or challenge does it address?
Now, due to advancements in generative AI, anyone can create convincing deepfakes at minimal cost with even a small amount of speech. Deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated and can utilize effective techniques like recorded voice play, speech synthesis, automated voice chatbots and voice conversion. Businesses are challenged with protecting their brand reputation, customer data and customer trust with the threat of deepfakes and generative AI technology. Regulations and public attention around deepfakes are increasing as well, so companies need to stay ahead to make sure they can protect against ever-evolving fraud tactics. Even just recently, we’ve seen wide scale deepfakes of public figures such as Joe Biden and Taylor Swift in the news that are extremely harmful to victims and spread misinformation to the public. We expect that this year, these attacks are only going to continue and become more advanced. Human ears can detect deepfakes only 57% of the time which is barely better than a coin toss. Additionally, existing defense mechanisms used by contact centers such as Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) questions, voice biometrics or caller ID validation are not capable of detecting or stopping deepfakes. Liveness detection, in conjunction with multi-factor authentication and anti-fraud techniques, is a more comprehensive and effective approach to protecting against deepfakes.
How does it increase member value?
Pindrop Pulse is seamlessly integrated with our existing anti-fraud and authentication products. Banks and Credit Unions that utilize Pindrop Pulse along with Protect and Passport can provide their members with enhanced protection from various forms of audio deepfake attacks and protect their accounts from human or machine generated account reconnaissance and takeover attempts. With Pindrop Pulse, contact center agents have more tools at their disposal to provide outstanding service to customers, authenticate them with more confidence and flag high risk phone calls for further investigation. The new technology allows businesses to adopt deepfake detection services from our industry-leading engine. Plus, our technology and research are always evolving, so we can quickly detect existing and new types of attacks as fraud tactics advance. Credit unions like Community America Credit Union (CACU) that used the Pindrop platform, have saved $570k in fraud losses, enhanced member experience by removing 115 seconds from total call times and improved Net Promoter Scores.
What differentiates this innovation from competitors?
Pindrop Pulse differentiates itself from competitors by providing an industry-leading deepfake detection rate of 99% with real-time detection within two seconds of netspeech. We utilize the largest training dataset of over 20 million unique utterances. Pindrop is a multi-factor solution that leverages liveness, voice, device, carrier metadata and behavior analysis to provide coverage at every stage of the call and provide value on the first call itself. Lastly, we are a proven cloud-native solution at scale, with over 100 million calls processed every month.
