Article

5 criteria for effective case management

As fraudulent activity rises, so does the need for systems that can identify, isolate and interrupt it.

June 27, 2014

by Josh Ablett
Anti-Fraud Advisor Intellinx

According to a recent study by PWC, 45 percent of organizations in the U.S. suffered from some type of fraud in the past two years, and more than half of these reported an increase in the number of occurrences.

Enterprise case management systems help an organization prevent fraud and comply with industry regulations, detecting suspicious activities and then performing detailed reporting and analysis. When deployed properly, they can quickly pay for themselves by delivering faster recoveries, greater efficiency with existing staff, and prevention of future crimes.

Following are five factors to consider when evaluating a case management system:

Flexibility

Business conditions are dynamic. An acquisition, or even rapid organic growth, will fundamentally change not only SAR reporting structures, but also how an enterprise assigns and reports on cases. Enterprise case management systems must be easily updated and scaled to handle new additions and group structures.

Business processes for preventing, detecting and responding to fraud can change rapidly. The case management system should be able to accommodate new workflows easily.

It is difficult to predict what types of analysis to perform, so a case management system should be able to collect data and perform analysis across data structures and time periods.

For example, if an FI needs to report on the extent of losses caused by check fraud for new accounts, the enterprise case management system needs to track deposit fraud vs. on-us check fraud, forged checks vs. forged signatures, and new accounts vs. existing accounts. Without this flexibility in reporting, investigators won’t be able to give an accurate answer.

Having the flexibility to customize based on changing priorities and without waiting in line for IT or vendor assistance enables information to be retrieved in a timely way to prevent losses.

Ease of integration

Investigations are about bringing data together to tell a story. Nothing wastes an investigator’s time like hunting across systems to find the necessary information, and then having to retype this information into a case management system. Every minute spent copying, pasting, and retyping is a minute the investigator is not recovering funds, interviewing suspects, or collecting information.

The case management system should provide interfaces with the following:

customer information database — customer address, associated accounts, phone numbers, etc. should automatically be entered into the case when an investigator picks a suspect, a witness, or a victim;
DDA/checking and savings systems — individual transactions should be marked as fraudulent. Not only will this feature save time typing and reduce errors, but it will be invaluable when looking at patterns and trends to build new fraud prevention rules;
check and ticket information — information about tickets that went through items processing should automatically retrieved and populated into the system;
imaging systems — making check images available to investigators can make the difference between cases that take hours and those that take seconds; and
physical security video system — investigators need to store videos and photographs as part of an investigation without any restriction on file size.
fraud alerting systems — Ensure that alert systems can automatically open and populate fraud cases to reduce duplicate data entry reduce response times.

Automation

The enterprise case management system should automatically generate notifications and other messages wherever possible to simplify workflow processes and increase employee productivity. Here are some simple tasks that can be automated:

reassignment of cases;
generation of letters auto-populated with details from a case;
export of encrypted data to share with other departments or law enforcement;
modification of collected data; and
alerts to case managers via mobile device.

Compliance

All banking functions are subject to oversight from both internal audit and external regulators. Financial crimes investigations, however, come with an added level of scrutiny. FinCEN regulations must be followed with consistent, accurate SAR filing, and documents and notes collected as part of an investigation might become evidence if a crime is ever litigated.

The enterprise case management system should automate as much of the compliance process as possible, not only to facilitate easier filings, but to ensure accuracy when reporting financial crime, such as, e-filing of suspicious activity reports and automatic identification of incidents when a SAR is required.

Ease of migration

If a case management system is already in place, the migration to a new system needs to be a key factor in the decision making. Here are some factors to ensure that the migration is as smooth and accurate as possible:

an open, and clear database structure — proprietary database structures store data in fields in a way that can’t be easily understood by IT staff and can complicate migrations; and.
ability to support data transformation and loading tools — commonly referred to as ETL, this function requires that data be pulled out of the existing case management system, changed as required, and then loaded onto the new case management system. Better systems will have ETL tools built in to make the process go more smoothly. Otherwise, expect to need a high level of support from IT team developers and database administrators.

Enterprise case management is garnering much attention for its potential to combine intelligence from disparate systems into a single repository to more effectively prevent losses, meet regulatory compliance mandates and reduce costs.

When a system has the needed flexibility, system integration capabilities, and built-in automation for workflows and compliance, it can provide tremendous value for detecting and preventing fraud.

photo: kailash gyawali