If data is the lifeblood of the modern banking enterprise, then orchestration is its circulatory and nervous systems. Orchestration is what enables an enterprise to align its controls, grab the best data, derive the most important insights at the right time, and then take the appropriate actions to achieve specific business outcomes.
This flow of data, analysis and live decision-making is necessary because banks must make fast, integrated decisions in succession across multiple channels and through many facets of different account and product lifecycles. Orchestration enables banks to execute processes related to customer experience and fraud prevention. As customer journeys and fraud management processes become more integrated and digitized, the outcomes from their automated decisions can influence other decisions made along the chain.
Orchestration is what keeps these chain reactions aligned and timed correctly so that integrated data analysis and decisioning can work rapidly and accurately across the enterprise to protect consumers against fraud.
Why Orchestration Is Important
Since ChatGPT is the rage, I asked it why orchestration is important. Its answer was surprisingly clear.
ChatGPT says orchestration is “important in software because it helps manage complex systems made up of multiple components or services that need to work together to achieve a desired outcome.” It adds that “each component has its own responsibilities and they must coordinate their actions to achieve a common goal.”
This is especially true for fraud and risk management as schemes become more complex. Individual behaviors that are part of a fraud scheme may not trigger anything on their own, but taken together with a centralized, orchestrated viewpoint, the patterns are detectable. The key is minimizing the time to detect and then act, and orchestration is central.
Picture a scenario where data collected across an enterprise is fed to a fraud management platform which, in its rapid analysis, detects incidence of fraud and immediately triggers multi-channel communications to affected customers. These steps are best coordinated with orchestration so that many different types of positive actions can be defined and supported. This is a stark contrast to hard-coding procedures into place, which may not be sufficient to improve fraud management or customer experience, especially as the fraud environment changes over time.
4 Aspects of Orchestration to Improve Fraud Management
Orchestration’s key benefits include scalability, consistency, flexibility, and the ability to enable sophisticated automation across the enterprise. Each plays a key role in any enterprise’s ability to combat fraud and assure positive experiences, even when transaction volumes and fraud cases peak.
As banks look to adopt orchestration to improve fraud management, they will find that a methodical approach delivers the best results. Here are four fundamental steps to get started.
1. Get and normalize the data
The first questions a bank must answer are what data it requires, how to get at that data wherever it lives in the enterprise, and what paths exist to feed it to something that can analyze and act on it.
These datasets can be extremely diverse and include internal sources, external and third-party sources, data entries from customers, data lakes and data marts, core systems, and more. Knowing where the data lives and how to access and move it is crucial as is the ability to parse and merge data and perform extract/transpose/load (ETL) functions on it to put it all in a common format.
2. Know your capabilities and desired outcomes
Once the data is in hand, the next step is knowing what to do with it. The bank must define what capabilities to invoke based on the data and the desired outcome(s). Different types of fraud are detected based on analysis of very different data sources. A mapping of which data goes with which analyses and functional capabilities is the key.
3. Know where to send the data
With capabilities mapped, a bank can define where and when to send data to derive insights to take the best actions. In the past, complex processes were built like funnels where all capabilities would be executed in a specific structured order. In the digital world, flows are more like many mini-funnels, where bits of data are captured, decisions are made, decision outcomes are created, and capabilities are invoked in different orders depending on the scenario.
Picture a consumer who logs into a mobile app, changes their address and mobile number, adds a beneficiary, and sends a real-time payment. Without orchestration, each of these individual steps may happen without causing any kind of risk alert. But using robust orchestration, and tying this specific series of actions with known patterns associated with authorized push payment fraud (APP fraud), this case could easily be flagged as a real-time payment scam. If that insight were generated, the right data would go to fraud management to kick off the proper actions, such as contacting the customer to address what happened.
4. Define how capabilities, decisions and outcomes will be orchestrated
Imagine you have 10 different capabilities that are part of a solution. Those capabilities might include calling data from customer profiles, retrieving transactions histories, or executing step-up authentication as transactions exceed limits. But not all the capabilities are called in every scenario.
It is necessary to define which capabilities are utilized in different scenarios and in what order. Keep in mind that data and decisions can make multiple trips around an analytical loop. New insights can be generated each time, and they should be available when the next decisions are made so that a continuous feedback loop is created. Then all insights from decisions that have been made or are being made now can be applied to other orchestrated decisions, where the outcomes will benefit as a result.
Orchestration: The Great Differentiator
Orchestration is important for banks because they can be large and complex businesses where customer journeys – and frauds – can span many channels with disconnected systems and processes. Orchestration is the way to align controls by having the right data and decisions applied at the right time and in the right place to improve customer experiences and fraud management.
With a centralized, platform-based orchestration approach, banks can cut through the noise, gather the data they need to fuel automated decisions, and act in real-time to improve customer experiences and fraud prevention.
How FICO Delivers Enterprise Orchestration
- Register for FICO World 2023 to hear directly from experts on orchestration and fraud protection
- Learn how FICO Platform provides a comprehensive technology foundation for the entire enterprise, including your fraud organization
- Read more about Authoring and Orchestrating Impactful Decisions with FICO Platform
- Explore more on using contextual intelligence and orchestration to fight fraud
