Balancing Defense and User Experience – David Divitt, Veriff

This is techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrong tv. Um, our next guest today, I'm very proud to have David Diff divot.

David is the senior director of fraud prevention and experience at a company called verif. Hey, David, welcome to Textron tv. Hey, Alan, nice to be here.

Thanks. No problem. So, David, I think you are the first senior director of fraud prevention and experience we've ever interviewed here on Textron tv.

So congratulations. Well tell Honored that was about that role. Yeah, well, it's an interesting one actually.

So, I mean, I've been in the anti-fraud space for over 20 years now. Um, mostly focused in actually the financial fraud side of things. So payments fraud, uh, relatively new into the I D V space, which is where verif plays.

Um, and actually, so, you know, the fraud part of my title is something that I'm very, very comfortable with, very well established with. The interesting part of the title also comes after that, the experience side of things, because I look after more than just fraud. I look after some of the customer interactions with our services.

And actually I think that's a really interesting part of my job because fraud and customer experience can sometimes be, uh, not the most, uh, comfortable bedfellows if, if you say right. So a, a bad, um, fraud strategy can negatively affect your customer experience. So I really like having both of those, um, parts of my, of my role that I can, I can look at how do they balance.

Excellent. Um, let's talk a little, you know, you, you have years and years in this, but let's talk a little bit about the company, though. It's, it's probably a company that is new to a lot of our audience.

So why don't you give us a little, you know, verif background. Uh, yeah, absolutely. So, verif, as I mentioned, uh, uh, a moment ago, it focuses on digital identity and, um, document validation, right?

So we help companies, especially businesses that wanna move maybe from traditional bricks and mortar, um, style arrangements into the digital world by giving them the ability to onboard their customers, uh, without having face-to-face document and people checks. So that's kind of the core of the business, and it's really interesting. I mean, as you can imagine in this time, and especially fueled by, you know, the, the pandemic that that recently happened, that has pushed a lot of businesses into this, um, need for changing away from having all of this face-to-face interaction for things like onboarding, uh, for things like customer authentication.

Uh, and so, uh, our company plays a really key role there in making sure that they can continue their business and they can grow their business, they can grow maybe into new niches because now they, they can, um, rely on the kind of digital, uh, onboarding as opposed to always face to face. Absolutely. Um, you know, what, did we mention a website for people wanting to get more information?

No, I mean, if people wanna have a look at our, our stuff, definitely. com. You can Google us and you'll find us.

Absolutely. We've, we've got a number of services, we'll talk a lot more today about the kind of fraud side of things and how some of the changes we've seen, I think in recent in business trends have led to, to some fraud problems. Um, and we talked some more about that on our website as well.

Very cool. So, and, and that, that's a great segue, actually, I guess into the, the meat of our discussion today. And that is getting ahead in the fraud race, and look, fraud is fraud.

You know, it's not the oldest profession in the world, as they say, but, but it's been around a long time, right? And, and certainly with the move to digital and, you know, online stuff, fraud, uh, moved right along with it, right? And, and we've seen fraud.

What, what's interesting is if you look at if we ever had a museum of fraud, right? And you looked at kind of the, the changing nature of it, you gotta admire the innovation, right? The ingenuity of some of these fraud fraudsters.

Uh, it seems like, you know, you're always trying to build a better mouse trap for these people. Absolutely. And you'd be naive to, to think that they weren't innovative and creative and well funded.

Mm-hmm. Yes, they are. Um, and, and so, you know, you call it the fraud race and staying ahead in the fraud race, it very much is a fraud race.

But I'm afraid for many people out here, and, you know, watching this, it's a race and a game where we're always the cat and the fraud's, the mouse, and, you know, we are reactive and instead of proactive a lot of times, and we're always kinda one step. I always forget which one's Tom and which one's Jerry, but we're, you know, we're definitely the cat. The mouse is running, so how do we stay ahead?

It's, I mean, that's the question, right? I, I mentioned upfront that I've been doing this for more than 20 years, and, and I'm afraid there isn't, there isn't a perfect answer, right? It is a constant, uh, a constant back and forth, right?

We will make advances and then they will, and we will, and they will. And, and so realizing that I think is one of the important things that people have to have to start, like all of, uh, a strategy, a anti-fraud strategy for every business needs to realize that you can't stand still. Like that's, that's the core message.

Anything you put in place today will immediately be probed and, and, um, attacked by the fraudsters until they find a way around it. And so making sure you've planned for that change is incredibly, uh, uh, critical to success, and it will basically allow you to, to build in this change to your strategy. Um, I think first and foremost, that's what people really need to realize.

Agreed. Agreed. So help us, you know, David, you're the expert.

You are senior director of fraud prevention and experience. What, what can we do to, you know, what could our audience do out here to stay ahead on these things? Yeah, sure.

Absolutely. I mean, I'll start by talking a little bit about planning, I guess, and then we can talk about tools and, and that type of thing as well. So, um, apart from planning for a kind of evolution, a change that's never gonna sit still, right?

Um, it's really important that businesses consider that any new product or service they're bringing to market is gonna be kind of by its nature, the most vulnerable to new loopholes that the fraudsters may, may find, right? And they're gonna be active in pursuing those because, uh, it has the least time being kind of, uh, battle hardened, let's say, right? So they're more likely to get benefit early on.

And then as things hold loopholes get plugged, it becomes harder and harder. You have to realize that the fraudsters hold motive is an r o I, right? Just like most businesses, um, they want to invest, you know, the, the least amount of time for the biggest return.

And so, um, making sure that you put as many barricades barriers in front of them to reduce that return on investment is, is the way that you can kind of dissuade them and make them go elsewhere. So early on, if you're bringing new product services to market, making sure you've really ta taken the time to think through what are some potential risk areas that we see in this new business that could be exploited. Um, and quite often, y you know, and especially when we have market pressures like for instance, rapid digitization that's caused by a pandemic, businesses are, you know, prioritizing getting there quickly as opposed to giving themselves time to really plan for some of the risks.

And this is always gonna be the case, but it's important to do as much as you can to think, look, we're bringing this service to, to market. Uh, could this area be exploited by fraudsters? And if yes, how do we put in place some strategies to protect against that?

So this upfront planning is, is super critical. Now, um, you know, I mentioned a couple of times digitization of some of these more traditional services. Think banking, healthcare, government, right?

These are services that have a very long traditional, um, bricks and mortar, uh, set of processes, especially for bringing new customers on board. And so when there's this, uh, rapid shift to digital during the pandemic, it, it was starting before, but it was ac accelerated by the pandemic. Um, these businesses had to move online very quickly.

Now, the ones that started working with partners like us who are experienced in this type of, um, this type of world, I think had more success. They were able to leverage tools that, that businesses like ours have been refining for years. We're very, we're very used to the kind of back and forth fraud struggles.

So we have a lot of technology that we can put in place to help these businesses going into new areas, protect from some of these loopholes that they may either not have seen themselves or weren't able to fix themselves in time just because of the rapid progression that they've been going towards. So I think businesses that are willing to, uh, invest in, in working with partners who have an expertise in this area will always have more chance of, of, um, of winning that battle, at least early on in this, you know, launching a new service, for instance. Fair enough.

Um, what, you know, again, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be at the advocate for our audience here. Can you give us some breadcrumbs, right? Give, give us this trail here.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, let's talk a little bit about technology now, because I think especially these days, we all hear ai, we all hear DeepFakes. These are, these are the buzzword dejure, and, um, and they're playing a huge role right now in not only the fraudsters approach, but also, um, the people who are trying to stop the frauds, right?

So, um, for a number of years we've had, um, various approaches to AI to protect against fraud, right? So it started back with neural networks, you know, I don't know, 30 plus years ago now, uh, trained to find generally payment fraud early on, you know, credit card fraud, et cetera. Uh, those have evolved to a whole suite of really interesting machine learning, uh, or AI models that are designed to find suspicious things in the data.

So this could be transactions, if you're talking about banks or, or fintechs. Uh, it could be suspicious, um, identity val verification, um, sessions, if you're talking about our world, right? So we, um, we invest a lot of time and money in the AI side of things because what it lets us do is examine a huge number of data points very rapidly and come to a decision on whether or not we think a thing is anomalous from, from the rest.

And so, AI in our world has been, has been crucial. Um, but interestingly, the fraudsters employ the same thing, right? So the fraudsters also are using ai, they're using AI to probe all of our customer systems.

So they will use combative, um, AI to basically find those holes. They'll also use AI to create these false identities, false documents, false people. And this is where the ai, the kind of deep fake threat really comes in.

Uh, we're seeing a more and more, uh, attempts come in where either the document itself, the, you know, the picture of the document or the person has been synthetically generated, right? And that today, most of them are mediocre attempts, right? The tooling is, is at a point where it's easy to use, but maybe the best stuff isn't being used that much yet.

But that's gonna change because I see every day new tools, new attempts coming on, you know, there are some real, there's some really interesting even adverts on TV that are showing how a good deep fake can can actually look so real once that tool, you know, crosses the line of being so real, so authentic. And so, um, a affordable for fraudsters to use, then we're at an interesting tipping point where you really have to rely on technology to help you stop and detect these things because it's only the kind of very subtle and well-trained eye of, of a machine learning model that can pick up on some of these subtle things, even if human will will struggle a lot of times. Yeah.

So we're gonna use AI to thwart AI fraud, AI to exactly technology, fights technology. And I, you know, that is, that's just be gonna become more and more, uh, true as we, as we go on here. You know what, this whole notion of AI stuff though, David goes back right to the beginning of our conversation, you know, the cat and mask came, and, you know, I just, with all due respect, I don't see anything on the horizon that fundamentally changes that dynamic.

And it's, it's frustrating, it's frustrating, it's frustrating for our audience, I'm sure as well. But, um, I guess it's just the nature of the beast. It is the nature of it.

Um, and, you know, the more, the more, I always describe fraud a bit like a balloon, right? So I can squeeze the balloon and reduce the fraud in one area, but it doesn't get smaller. It kind of pops out the other side.

And, and that's the unfortunate reality of a lot of this. You know, you can shift the problem around and you can change the shape, but completely eliminating it is, is very, very difficult. Um, because there's always gonna be a weak link in the chain.

If it's not the technology, then it will be the, the, the consumer or the customer themselves. And this is what we've seen a massive rise in scams across the world. And, you know, in all areas, when you lock the door, what do you do?

The criminals go to the person with the key, who's the actual customer. And so it, it's, it's a very interesting problem. And there, there will always be weak links that, that they will find, unfortunately.

Agreed. Agreed. All right.

Um, hey, David, we're, we're almost outta time ready. This went really quickly, but again, give us that, uh, link for the verif website for people to get more information. Absolutely.

com verif, uh, and have a look at, uh, some of the interesting things we're doing to stop the badies in the, uh, in the identity and verification world. Fantastic. Thanks for being our guest here on techstrong tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with more Techstrong in a minute.