Heroes in Business - Experian Identity Report with Matt Ehrlich, Senior Director, Product Management for Experian NA Decision Analytics

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Matt Ehrlich, Senior Director, Product Management for Experian’s Decision Analytics business in North America. Experian recently announced that Hunter, a fintech fraud prevention data network, will be available later this year in the United States. Learn about Hunter and how it can help fintechs combat fraud. David Cogan of Eliances entrepreneur community and host of the Heroes Show interviews www.Experian.com  

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Eliance's Heroes. Eliance's is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups, where our heroes in business align. Now, here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Alliances. And again, another incredible, fantastic week. Couldn't be more excited about our lineup this week. And we're back again. That's right. It's the Experian Identity Report on Alliances. And we are bringing you these special reports with the world's leading experts about game-changing impact of identity and the need to use reliable data to make confident decisions that safely accelerate customer engagement.

And this week, we're joined by Matt Ehrlich, Senior Director of Product Management for Experian's Decision Analytics business in North America. Now, I know Experian recently announced that Hunter, a fintech fraud prevention data network, will be available later this year in the United States. Matt, we're looking really forward to learning about Hunter, really, and how it can help fintechs combat fraud. So with that, let's jump right in, really. What is Experian Hunter? Yeah, thanks for having me, David. We are really excited about Hunter launching in North America.

Hunter is a FinTech focused fraud data network. So Think Consortium, our FinTech participants will contribute data that includes fraud experiences, fraud detected and prevented, as well as fraud that they've experienced. And they'll have the ability as a collective network to inquire against those fraud experiences, all with the goal of preventing more fraud, both for our customers, FinTech customers, our FinTech companies that participate in making it both safer and easier to apply for new financial services online. That's great. Now, tell me though, or tell our audience too, what kind of fraud though, will Hunter help combat? Because there's so many different types out there. There certainly are. And fraud is a complex world. We're going to be initially laser focused on preventing application fraud. So typically the way we think about fraud is sort of where in the process or life cycle,

say in financial services, that fraud can occur. In this case, this is application at the time of application. It could also be the takeover of an existing account, which is after a consumer has applied, been approved, set up and established their account. Application fraud is important, right? Because you want to have your strongest defenses at the beginning of the process and the beginning of the relationship with customers. So we think about where the fraud's occurring. Hunter is going to focus initially on application fraud. Then we think about the multitudes of fraud types, as you alluded to. Let me talk just a little bit about those.

We have third-party fraud. This is also known as identity theft. And so this would be if Matt, as the bad guy, stole David's information and then went online and I'm impersonating you, attempting to open up loans or other financial instruments in your name and then control the access to that credit and obviously abuse it. That's third party fraud or identity theft. I've stolen your information and imposing as you. We're also solving for first-party fraud. First-party

fraud is also known by true party fraud. That means Matt, in this case, who's committing the fraud, I'm going to use my own information to commit fraud. And it's nuanced. The way we detect first-party fraud typically is we look for intent. Is there something about the information that Matt has provided in that application that suggests he has no intent to pay? It's a bit trickier, right? Because we can't detect if some of the information used on the application is suspicious or doesn't look right because Matt knows all of his own information when he's applying, but he has no intent to pay. And that's first party fraud. The third main type that will be focused on, and there is a whole set of subcategories and nuanced fraud out there,

David, but they all typically roll up into these. Third category that you've hopefully heard about is synthetic ID fraud. We call this sometimes Frankenstein fraud. This is when I take some real information that might not be mine, such as a child's social security number, and then I create a whole credit and social and profile around that to make it look and feel as much like a real person as possible. But it's not. It's synthetic and it's, you know, very, very difficult to detect, causes significant losses. And so we'll be focused on preventing synthetic fraud, first party fraud and third party fraud. Wow, sounds amazing. Thank you again for sharing that. And by the way, too, you're watching and listening to me, David Kogan,

host of the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure that you go to alliances.com, that's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com, and you can click on radio to hear more past interviews, including many with the Experian Identity Report, because we have with us again, Matt Ehrlich. He is the Senior Director of Product Management for Experian's Decision Analytics business in North America. Make sure you go to Experian. That's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N. And we're here today talking about Hunter. So a fintech fraud prevention data network. Why is Experian though bringing it to the market now? Yeah, the time is now because we're seeing some uncertain economic conditions.

And in that climate, fraud typically increases really all of the types of fraud that I just mentioned. So with uncertain economic conditions, we see increases in fraud, which means it's more work and more difficult for our clients. And then with that uptick in fraud, we heard from our clients that, while some of the solutions that they have in place are stopping fraud,

there is still an opportunity through this data network to get more of an early warning or early notification of fraud through contributed data. And so what I mean by that is fraud solutions are typically looking for risk signals, and it's based on information across large identity graphs and data sources. It's using technology such as device information. But sometimes those take a period of time to recognize those fraud signals. What we're talking about here with Hunter and the data network is in real time, our clients are contributing experiences. And then again, in real time, being able to acquire those. And so the concept is, if one fintech has a fraud experience two days ago, by the time that fraudster or criminal ring

moves to the next one, which is what they typically do, they will have shared that fraud experiences and that becomes an early fraud signal for the next fintech that's suffering from that attack. And so we see this and our clients see this as an opportunity to do incremental fraud prevention above and beyond the tools that are in place today. Excellent, excellent. And what do you see as the impact fintechs could see though, fintechs directly? Yeah, well, I've talked a lot about fraud and the fraud impact so a clear impact would be and a goal is reduction in fraud all types of fraud but there are some other downstream benefits to doing a better job of preventing fraud one is better recognizing the good customers so you know all of us as us as consumers get frustrated when we're required

to do additional verification or prove that it's truly us on the other end of the device. And so Hunter, the fraud network, will help both better identify fraud, but also better identify the real person with good intent on the other side of the device, making it faster, easier, more efficient for them to complete their application. We see an opportunity to reduce costs, right? So there's quite a bit of spend on fraud defenses today. And so with this, there'll be better efficiency, better detection, and collaboration to reduce costs. And then ultimately our FinTech clients need to grow, right, especially in an uncertain economic condition. So they can grow more safely by identifying

those true customers with good intent and improve their bottom lines. Excellent. This is very valuable information again, sharing. Matt, thank you for coming on to announce Hunter, a fintech fraud prevention data network that will be available later this year in the United States. Matt Ehrlich, Senior Director of Product Management for Experian's decision analytics business in North America. Make sure that you go to Experian.com. That's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliances community. And make sure that you go to Alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com.

Click on radio, go to Experian, listen to past episodes because these are here to help you. Thank you again so much, Matt.