According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, seven percent of Americans over the age of 16 face at least one incidence of identity theft every year. That means that over a five-year period, over 35 percent of the country’s adult population is likely to be affected. Dealing with identity theft is time consuming, annoying, and expensive, and most people would rather avoid it.
If your financial institution protects its customers from identity theft, that’s a big selling point, and you want to highlight your efforts in your marketing materials. However, you don’t necessary want to tip your hand so that scammers know what you’re doing. To find the right balance between sharing compelling details with prospective clients and keeping your anti-fraud strategy away from the scammers, check out these tips.
Highlight Customer-Facing Products and Services
To get customers excited about what you’re doing to protect them from fraud, focus on the services that affect them directly. For instance, exception item workflow tools may help you to save time and detect fraud more easily, but they’re virtually meaningless to your clients. Instead, tell your clients about your automated signature verification tools, which prevent forged checks from getting past you.
Share the Right Numbers
When going into the nitty-gritty details of your fraud protection efforts, make sure you share the right numbers and avoid information that could help scammers. For instance, let’s say you manually look at every check over a certain threshold before cashing it. If you share that number, the scammers immediately know to write smaller checks.
Instead, you should share a different detail such as the number of days since your bank has faced a serious fraud threat, the number of forged checks you detected last year, the amount you spend on fraud protection per customer compared to the competition, or another positive number.
Market Optional Fraud Protection Products
If you offer products or services such as fraud protection and restoration services, make sure to mention those options in your marketing materials. You want your customers to know that they can count on you, but at the same time, you want to encourage them to buy these products and protect themselves.
Plug Your Partners
Typically, fraud prevention is not something that you handle on your own, and you shouldn’t be afraid to let your clients know that. If you’re part of any fraud prevention organizations, mention those affiliations in your marketing materials. If you use any specific technology to fight fraud, you may want to share that information as well.
Talk About Machine Learning
Most consumers are at least a little bit familiar with the huge role algorithms play in their lives, and your financial institution probably uses algorithms as well. However, on their own, some anti-fraud algorithms can be disruptive.
For instance, if an algorithm notices an abnormal purchase and flags your customer’s account for a review, that’s useful in theory. However, when there’s no fraud present, 20% of customers get so fed up with the erroneous fraud alerts that they just quit using the card altogether. To prevent this from happening, you need machine learning. Those advanced tools get to know your customers and their habits in a way that decreases fake fraud flags. If you’re using machine learning tools, let your customers know. That can be a big selling point for your services.
At SQN Banking Systems, we offer a variety of fraud protection tools and workflow solutions to financial institutions. If you need a new partner in your fraud prevention efforts, contact us today. We’d love to help.