How Hyper-Personalized Communications Can Stop Scams

We’ve seen a number of recent steps by regulators around the world requiring financial institutions to step up their game when it comes to communicating with their customers when a scam is suspected. These steps are crucial in the fight against scams, but what we are seeing in the market is a number of our clients going well above and beyond what regulators are requiring. This of course raises the question whether a “wait and see” strategy to customer communications is costing your organization money and customer retention.

Before we delve into what we have been seeing in the market and where we think customer communications is heading, let’s take a look at some of the recent developments in the regulatory landscape around scams communications.

Singapore Moves to Require Real-Time Scams Communications

The days of relying on manual outbound calls or other dated customer communication strategies for scams will go the way of the horse and the buggy with the proposals made in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Consultation Paper on Proposed Shared Responsibility Framework. This proposal from October of 2023 stipulates that it will be the responsibility of the financial institution to:

• Provide outgoing transaction notification alert(s) on a real-time basis.

Failure to meet this responsibility will mean that the financial institution is non-compliant, and therefore any scam loss incurred by the customer would be the responsibility of the financial institution.

UK’s Payment Service Regulator Moves Towards Bespoke Communication

In December of 2023 we saw one of the first moves by a regulatory agency to push for more bespoke customer messaging when it comes to scams. This guidance came via the UK’s Payment Service Regulator (PSR), where they stated in their Consumer Standard of Caution Exception Guidance:

“Any intervention for the purpose of this exception should be bespoke. They must be consumer, scam, and transaction specific. They should not consist of ‘boilerplate’ written warnings"

The aim of this bespoke messaging is to “break the fraudster’s spell” and drive consumers to identify whether the transaction is in fact legitimate.

Catch-Up or Leading?

These two proposals are definitely steps in the right direction. But as a fraud leader you should question whether just relying on what the regulators are requesting is enough to position yourself ahead of your competitors, and enough to protect your customers against scams. I would argue that waiting for regulations to be rolled out in your country will do neither you nor your customers any favors.

In reality you should already be moving towards a hyper-personalized strategy when it comes to your customer communications for traditional fraud (account takeover (ATO), card not present (CNP), identity theft, etc.) and even more importantly scams. Hyper-personalization is all about communicating with a customer in real-time, on the communication channel they prefer, with a message that speaks to the specific concern for that customer at the point of time.

This is a key concept that we stress when discussing with our clients how they should interact with their customers. Correctly deploying a hyper-personalized strategy leads to:

• Customers being better informed on the nature of the fraud issue
• “Breaking the spell of the fraudster” through more targeted, personalized messaging
• Customers feeling empowered to make better decisions
• Greater likelihood of connecting with customers and getting them to respond, as you are using their preferred communications channels
• Higher customer self-resolution, leading to lower operational costs

What We’re Seeing in the Market

At FICO World 2024, one of our UK clients described how they have taken this message of hyper-personalization to heart. In the case of a suspected scam or potentially fraudulent transaction, their customer will receive in real time:

• A bespoke message tailored to the type of transactional activity
• Drop-down response choices with the goal of getting the customer to consider the transaction request
• Additional decision logic built into the dropdowns, which potentially triggers other questions
• Feeding of the question-and-answer dialogue in real time back into the fraud platform to make a decision whether or not to block the request to make a payment 

This communications strategy is exactly in line with the approach used by one of our Brazilian clients. At FICO World 2024, that client shared their experience of how they tailored their fraud prevention customer communications to the specifics of the Brazilian market (where WhatsApp is the most prevalent form of communication) and delivered real-time, transaction-specific, scam-specific and customer-specific messages to help break the spell of the scammers.

Besides sharing with us the financial gains they made due to lower operational costs (via customer self-resolution) and the increase in fraud prevented, they also showed us some of the “Obrigado” (thank you) messages they received from clients, who were extremely grateful and stated that without the questioning of the transaction they would have lost a lot of money.

It is important to remember that every customer interaction at the time of a potential fraud is in fact a business opportunity. If you get it right, you have more than likely gained a customer for life. If you get it wrong it is highly unlikely that you will be retaining that customer’s business. 

What’s Next in Scam Protection?

In my previous post I described the importance of utilizing a data intelligence loop in order to better understand the channels, customers and products being targeted by scammers, and using that information to facilitate continuous improvement of fraud controls, which will ultimately drive down fraud losses and minimize customer friction by giving you the information you need to make better decisions.

When we think about bespoke scam communications, we in fact have another set of data points that we can leverage. By pushing these customer interactions into an analytical data mart and using this data in combination with our transactional data we can gain insights into:

• How effective is the messaging that we are utilizing?
• Does the messaging require additional fine-tuning?
• Does the speed of interaction with the scam questions lie outside the bounds of normal activity?
• Does that reaction time provide additional clues about potentially fraudulent activity?

As financial institutions begin to further leverage bespoke real-time scams communication interactions, we fully expect them to leverage this data in the decisioning of payments and to further refine their communications strategies.  

How FICO Helps Deliver Hyper-Personalized Scam Prevention

• Learn how FICO is leading the way in detecting and helping prevent scams
• Explore why FICO clients are using real-time customer communications to stop more fraud.
• Get familiar with FICO’s award winning, machine learning-powered retail banking model with scam detection score
• Read the FICO 2023 Scams Impact Survey