3 Key Takeaways from Industry Experts: How to Grow Faster with Accelerated Card Issuance

Takeaway 1:
Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is Not the Gold Standard Anymore

Through our behavioral insights, we’re able to identify whether applicants are familiar or unfamiliar with their personal information and enable financial institutions to act on that behavioral insight. If you think about your long-term and short-term memory, if I ask you what your address is, your name, your email, or your phone, you’d likely have that on instant recall and be able to tell it to me very quickly. And that’s essentially the type of signals that we’re able to pull out digitally as applicants move throughout your application. – James

James and Elan went on to further explain how high-fidelity, field-level behavioral metrics can gauge fraud potential, without requiring friction-filled PII collection from users. In fact, for many forms of identity theft, PII itself is unreliable. As synthetic identity fraud—the use of a combination of PII to fabricate a person’s identity—becomes more and more prevalent, PII is losing reliability and even opening new vulnerabilities. Which is why VGS takes an enrichment approach to any PII it collects (read below for more on that important distinction).

Takeaway 2:
We Need to Move Beyond Data Capture to Data Enrichment

At VGS, we don’t just simply store PII. We enrich it. So you can have credit information going back over time, and with VGS you can enrich it with KYC information, address information, and other information that helps you perform your analytics on a vast array of metrics that you’d like to look at without the risk of exposure, because the information is of no use to anyone outside your organization. – Elan

Because PII has those constraints mentioned in takeaway one above, VGS has developed ways to both eliminate the temptation for fraudsters to target any PII-pool of information, while building additional analysis of that data for a fuller picture of every applicant. This not only helps prevent fraud, but also reduces false positives, which are the scourge of traditional data set and consortium-only approaches. As credit bureaus become the de facto standards for establishing identities (despite not having been built for that purpose), any applicant with a limited digital footprint or thin-file credit history is locked out. This is even worse when put in context of who those thin-file, low footprint applicants usually encompass: younger generations who have a long customer lifespan to dedicate to the right card provider (and are potentially turned away right at the door, despite being genuine applicants). Anyone who wants to onboard every single genuine applicant needs their data to reach further, through deeper and more holistic enrichment levels.

Takeaway 3:
The Best Fraud Prevention Provides a Revenue & Compliance Backbone

We can help you reach PCI compliance quicker by being your compliance infrastructure. Especially for start-ups, the first thing they think of is raising revenue, not ensuring compliance. However, when you work in the financial services space, compliance is anywhere and everywhere. – Elan

As innovative banks and credit card issuers take advantage of today’s digital-first landscape, they focus on moving fast: not on their looming constraints, be they at the budgetary or compliance-level. With the right fraud protection at onboarding, these companies get way more than security. They can go to market quicker, lower the cost of data storage, and get to vital levels of compliance much faster than their competition.

Most fraud solutions provide peace of mind against data breaches—but the most valuable approaches will also lower overall costs of doing business in innumerable, substantial ways.