Frequently Asked Questions

A successful Omni-delivery solution requires innovative technology and functionality. For it to be comprehensive, it must include the following:

• Transactional support
• Data management
• Digital capabilities
• Multiple channels and devices
• Omni-channel workflow
• Analytics

From an operational perspective, it must scale and include the following:

• High performance
• Longer‑term maintainability
• Mission-critical operational reliability

Our Early Detection Monitoring Services staff monitors over 250 operational KPIs, far deeper than generic data center monitoring tools. Because of this depth, we predict 67 percent of potential outages before they occur. As a result, our customers achieved 99.994 percent operational reliability and resilience on ARGO servers. Our years of production results in the customer environment have demonstrated solution sustainability.

We combine ARGO’s innovative technology strength, our stellar balance sheet, and our industry content leadership. We always have a bias on investing preference where we have depth of innovation infrastructure. Then, we assess the business gains we think we can achieve for our bank customers. We prove we can bring significant value add before we invest and commit.

Our customer’s investment is sacred to us, and ensuring long-term sustainable value with a well-maintained solution is key. This is why we have a longer-term perspective. Our primary focus is not on ARGO’s quarterly profits but rather on innovation value for our customers, and heavy R&D investment back into the business helps us achieve our goal.

Technology equips FIs to identify and reduce risk in an omnichannel environment across the customer journey. While the rigors of risk management may appear to be at odds with frictionless customer experience and customer centricity, they are critical for protecting the FI and its consumers. Consumers demand not only the convenience of omnichannel access but also the security that comes from knowing that they are transacting financial business in a safe environment.

Risk management crosses five categories:

1. Customer risk: Validating consumer and business identity and attrition factors
2. Credit risk: Protecting the FI from loss due to bad debt
3. Operational and transactional risk: Ensuring internal controls, operational reliability, and proper authorities for transaction processing
4. Compliance risk: Operating within a complex and constantly evolving regulatory environment
5. Reputational risk: Protecting the FI against damage to the brand and community standing

Automation directly impacts all these, enabling mitigation at scale. It indirectly protects the FI against loss of trust with customers, partners, and the public.

A customer-centric delivery strategy uses automation to enhance protection across all 5 categories of risk. Consider several examples:

• Customer ID capture and authentication
• Policy adherence
• New account and loan decisioning
• Regulatory compliance
• Predictive risk analysis
• SLA monitoring and escalation

Customers have a long list of expectations regarding how they want to be treated. Customer experience is achieved through proactive engagement, driving digital customer satisfiers up and eliminating sources of friction. In fact, in most cases, friction attributes are more harmful than the upside benefit of satisfiers. Therefore, we must plan what to do and not do.

Two-way communication enables customers to respond, increasing their sense of being heard. Being responsive to their needs and concerns, such as tracking service-level agreements (SLAs), scores big points for customer experience.

Focusing on post-purchase onboarding best practices is another key satisfier. Advanced omnichannel fulfillment processes provide customers with choices and, by adding staff collaboration, offer high value. Appropriate customer service includes internal controls for governance, review, and fraud prevention, for example, and provides high customer convenience without compromising risk.

Treating each customer right yields high payback, as studies show that 70 percent of buying decisions are based on how the customer has been treated.

Digital fulfillment, for example, is fraught with risk today, having an 80 percent industry abandonment rate. This strongly indicates there is a lack of customer centricity in the industry. ARGO has both abandonment detection and resolution and customer-assisted operating mode to improve customer experience and reduce risk.

Frontline staff in the branch and outbound contact center need effective tools to help guide prospects from the early stage of awareness to a closed sale. Sales performance management (SPM) helps FIs improve sales through analysis of sales data, goal setting, and sales activity tracking. SPM increases sales productivity, improves forecasting, and motivates sales teams.

Key elements include:

• Improved sales pipeline and accurate forecasting
• Accelerated close times
• Staff accountability through set goals and tools to track progress
• Ensured follow-up on high-value leads such as referrals and scheduled appointments
• Increased lead generation based on prospect and customer needs sourced from staff and digital contacts
• Pipeline opportunities from lifestyle and behavioral disclosed information
• Improved sales campaigns to targeted leads, deployed through digital, staff, or a blended channel approach
• Increased productivity for managing daily activities, including contact tracking, Book of Business, and call planning
• Management insight offers an enterprise view to identify areas where staff can improve

Ninety percent of customers expect consistent experiences across channels. As banking services become increasingly commoditized, meeting and exceeding customer expectations remains crucial to be a market leader. After extensive study, ARGO identified four key actions for becoming the customer’s bank of choice:

• Engage and influence early in the customer journey with targeted and relevant information aligned with needs.
• Provide collaboration with staff across channels, allowing the customer to start, stop, and resume fulfillment in their channel of choice based on the level of help they need.
• Detect and reduce friction in processes, especially those resulting in abandonments. Automatically re-engage with targeted programs to ensure fulfillment completion.
• Onboard the customer smoothly into the service phase, ensuring customer loyalty and identifying future purchase stage opportunities.

Meeting customer needs and expectations requires a broad approach to fulfillment. A new face on traditional methods does not achieve its full potential. In fact, a bolt-on approach can lead to dissatisfaction, as seen in the high abandonment rates in the industry today. Considerable capabilities must be in place for digital fulfillment to provide the equivalent experience of staff-delivered services. An integrated omnichannel fulfillment strategy that begins early in the customer journey creates a path through the fulfillment process. This omni approach converts far more opportunities and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To gain an edge in today’s market, FIs must provide excellent customer experience (CX) across channels. This requires “listening” to prospects and customers in an omnichannel world. An active listening model increases acquisition by understanding and rapidly responding to needs.

Embedded “listening posts” across the customer’s journey include:

• Website sensory: Detect and interpret customer needs based on digital behavior.
• Customer engagement responses: Apply analytics and decisioning to measure and respond appropriately with campaigns.
• Personal financial planner: Obtain self-disclosed information related to customer needs with a goal-centric personal financial planning tool.
• Omnichannel fulfillment: Track fulfillment attempts and automatically send campaigns to draw people back to their abandoned applications.
• Staff interaction: Measure and monitor satisfaction related to staff engagement.
• Attrition risk: Identify and measure attrition risk factors and take action to mitigate them.

Based on data detected through embedded listening posts, a solution can measure behavior and sentiment. Automated decisioning sends relevant engagement when thresholds are met. Management insight through KPIs and reporting allows leaders to monitor, track, A/B test, analyze trends, and optimize the model.

Financial institutions face increased pressure to deliver great customer experience in an Omni-delivery world. Success requires increasing drivers of satisfaction and eliminating dissatisfaction factors. Fulfillment friction, cumbersome processes, lack of access to human assistance, and failure to meet service expectations degrade customer confidence and satisfaction. The result: Increased attrition and reputational risk. Inefficient paper-based service increases response times and degrades customer experience.

With increasing digital usage and self-service preference, service provides a key touchpoint for driving satisfaction. According to a recent study by Gladly (“What Customers Expect from a Modern Online Shopping Experience”), 63 percent of customers “fall in love with brands because of great service.” And 62 percent “will recommend a brand to a friend because of great service.”

Executed well, service events provide loyalty and growth-building opportunities. Done poorly, service events increase attrition risk.

The average creditworthiness of applicants in the digital channel is lower than in a traditional delivery model. Anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the credit requests do not present viable opportunities. ARGO uses a multi-stage process to mitigate these challenges.

• Risk Filtering: The multi-stage process filters out non-viable applicants based on factors like credit grade, geographic misalignment, and analytically identified fraudulent intentions.
• Early-Stage Checks: Automation checks for OFAC, fraud, charge-offs, age, and address validation.
• Credit Bureau Check: The next stage includes a full credit bureau check for major derogatory tradelines.
• Auto-Decline: Applications failing loan policy or business rules in these stages are automatically declined.

Today, nearly all consumer segments have altered the way they interact with suppliers due to the convenience of digital. This affects every stage of their customer journey—awareness, consideration, purchasing, service and support, retention, and relationship expansion. With digital channels, technology provides rich capability to strengthen the model in a dozen strategic high-value areas. A successful customer delivery model blends digital and human interaction.

Customers research how to address their needs during the awareness and consideration stages. However, FIs are unaware of this activity in a digital world. So, during the most critical stages for acquisition, an FI cannot influence as it could in a physical engagement.

Perhaps as important, digital customers choose self-service fulfillment. However, digital abandonment rates average about 80 percent.

Retention is also problematic, as diminished physical contact makes it difficult to monitor satisfaction and dissatisfaction signals.

These examples illustrate the decline in the effectiveness of traditional customer delivery models. Communication and engagement methods have changed. New risks have also been introduced, including customer identity, low credit quality, and fraud.

As consumers continue to expand their digital preferences, a modern strategy creates a framework to drive revenue growth. Plans can best be achieved by adopting a four-pronged approach, including:

• Fortify revenue drivers
• Align omnichannel delivery
• Detect and mitigate risk
• Leverage technology

FIs have lost personal interaction with prospects during the early stages of awareness and consideration. This change is due to a shift toward digital research and buying habits. Gaining and keeping customers in an Omni world requires automation. This automation detects and meets the consumer’s needs while driving the FI’s goals. Data drives timely and relevant engagement. Data includes lead generation details, service and support events, satisfaction and friction signals, and the risk of attrition.

While digital self-service access increases volumes, not all opportunities are viable. Poorly managed, this low-value volume consumes expensive staff resources. Automating initial decisioning equips the FI to engage digitally for lower-quality prospects and route high-propensity and high-value opportunities to staff. This level of automation keeps marginal costs low, maximizing the benefits of digital while optimizing staff utilization.

The FI defines and distributes goals from the enterprise level to regions, branches, and individuals. Goals define targets for a product category or type, as well as dollar or unit volume.

Automation captures sales opportunities from banker-detected interactions and digitally from self-reported needs. Decision analytics qualify these opportunities based on propensity scores. It directs qualified leads to a banker’s pipeline, using workflow to move the lead through the sales process. It routes referrals to appropriate teams or uniquely skilled individuals. It monitors service level agreements (SLAs) and notifies assigned parties to enforce timely responses.

Pipeline management measures the strength and deal-flow velocity by calculating the closing probability. Analyzing past results allows for precise forecasting for all sales opportunities generated by the system or staff. Banker dashboards provide insight into pipeline, results vs goals, campaigns, and referrals.

Management dashboards provide insight into sales performance. Managers can spot risks to achieving goals and pinpoint areas for improvement by reviewing drill-down metrics. They can track sales performance globally or at a regional, branch, or individual level, from lead through conversion.

As we move functionality out to the consumer, we must simplify and protect the process. This requires an elevated perspective to enhance the customer’s experience, empowering banks to become market leaders in customer acquisition and relationship expansion. Taking this approach creates far more opportunities in the purchasing phase. It then onboards those customers and accounts smoothly into the service and support phase, leading to happy customers and the opportunity to significantly expand relationships.

A successful model begins tracking and engaging the customer in the first mile of the customer journey. It learns their needs and engages intelligently to convert them into the purchasing phase, where the account is fulfilled. Potential abandonments are monitored and retargeted to convert more opportunities. To complete the fulfillment path, the customer is smoothly onboarded into the rest of their journey with the FI. Digital and staff channels work collaboratively throughout this process, taking advantage of the strengths of each channel. This holistic approach to fulfillment allows the FI to gain a sizable competitive advantage in acquiring customers and accounts.

Great CX provides a competitive advantage throughout the customer journey, especially in sectors with commoditized products. CX refers not only to customers but also to prospective customers before they make a purchase. Today, prospects assess banks using social media and websites without the bank’s knowledge. The FI benefits from a well-designed website equipped with technology that senses and analyzes visitor behavior. This provides an opportunity to influence and engage as the prospect makes decisions during the early stages of the customer journey. Pre-purchase, purchase, and service interactions offer payback, such as higher retention, a strengthened relationship, and creating a positive memory for your customers.

An omnichannel model for customer acquisition integrates digital self-service with a high level of human touch. It optimizes the use of resources, meets consumers in their channel and method of choice, and expands revenue. Engaging earlier, measuring the opportunity value, and responding in a timely and relevant manner benefits the FI and its customers.

While the FIs define their products, pricing, and locations, ARGO’s value-add contribution to acquisition success results in the following:

• Enhanced customer experience
• Improved response cycle time
• Earlier prospect detection
• More accurate prospect identification
• Probability-based propensity qualification
• Improved engagement timing and relevance

Technology can quantify and predict customer risk with an array of progressively stricter best practices aligned to the delivery channel, to:

• Identify implicit and explicit prospects.
• Authenticate customers using the latest security standards.
• Verify customers using available data sources to ensure they are who they say they are.
• Enforce due diligence and Know Your Customer (KYC) policies and procedures.
• Improve data quality through hygiene, composition, and reasonableness testing.
• Measure risk and adjudicate potential fraudulent activities based on weighted parameters for:
  • Intrinsic Entity Risk: Doing business with the person, business, or entity.
  • Geography Risk: Where the transaction or entity is located and transacting business.
  • Product and Services Transactional Risk: Based on the type of product or service being requested.

The solution utilizes customer data, including preferences, segmentation, usage patterns, CIF records, and transactional data, as well as external governmental data sources and third-party subscription services to authenticate customers and prevent fraud.

Studies show that consumers visit an average of 11 websites while doing research. So how does a bank gain insights when the customer is no longer speaking directly with staff? Technology is used to augment the banker insights. Digital sensory technology drives revenue across channels by detecting needs and reducing risk. ARGO’s digital sensory detects and measures website activity. From this, predictive analytics quantify the probability of engagement success. FIs can start engagement earlier, improving acquisition results.

Digital sensory-based lead generation bolsters the FI’s acquisition strategy. Automated campaigns and staff-led engagement enhance marketing initiatives.

Digital sensory also reduces fulfillment abandonment. The solution detects failed and incomplete application attempts, retargeting the consumer through automated and staff-based outreach.

Attrition is harder to manage in a digital world where face-to-face time is reduced. ARGO monitors over 50 positive and negative events, measures attrition risk, and takes data-driven action with automated retention programs. Management insight dashboards empower staff to identify risk factors and strengthen retention.

Proactive engagement can be assigned to specific market segments. Periodic engagement employs various communication methods. Surveys and feedback mechanisms enable closed feedback loops through two-way engagement.

The decision and rules engine houses industry-standard rules and bank policies, as well as attributes for the application, collateral, credit and debt ratios and calculations, pricing, compliance, business rules, and decisioning criteria. The solution automates decisions in real-time, or loans may be manually reviewed by underwriters if warranted. In either case, decisions are made in a consistent, well-documented, transparent manner, reducing errors, oversight, subjectivity, bias, and compliance risk.

Governance, risk, and compliance controls enforce regulatory requirements during the process. The solution uses decisioning analytics to trigger policy and compliance exceptions based on the financial institution’s business rules and policies. Overriding these exceptions requires an appropriate lending authority to review and document any mitigating factors.

Customer experience (CX) is the perception customers have of their interactions with an institution. They consider how a provider treats, respects, and serves them across every stage and touchpoint of the customer journey. Three components drive CX: Success rate, effort, and emotion. Customers need to be successful when interacting with your institution, whether depositing a check or applying for a loan. They need it to be easy, regardless of the transaction’s complexity. The final element is emotion, or how they feel about the interaction, website, institution, or person who helped them.

Financial institutions meet customer needs for great service by:

• Making the right set of functions available to consumers in self-service mode with bank controls over sensitive functionality
• Empowering customers by giving them control
• Making human support available through self-service and staff-assisted options
• Completing service requests in a timely fashion
• Delivering effective user experience
• Following up with customers to validate error resolution and high satisfaction

Retail banking digital marketing traditionally encompasses the full range of online efforts—such as SEO, social media, and content marketing—aimed at building brand awareness and establishing authority. Intelligent lead generation is a more targeted and tactical approach specifically designed to convert interest into actionable sales opportunities.

Intelligent lead generation (ILG) makes strategic use of digital channels to engage consumers. ILG allows much earlier pre-purchase activities. FIs begin customer or prospect engagement in the awareness and consideration stages, where consumers make purchase decisions.

ILG leverages derived and self-disclosed information starting with the first website touch. It listens to detect, identify, measure, threshold decision, target, engage, and track prospects early and throughout the customer journey.

Analytics measure signal strength to quantify intent and propensity-to-purchase (PTP). It gathers user identity information through sensory detectors and prompted self-disclosure. It collects high-quality prospect insights aligned to needs to ensure highly relevant engagement. Intelligent decisioning deploys engagement plans targeted to meet individual needs based on PTP and segmentation.

For example, if two visitors stop by the bank’s website, analytics detect and measure each user’s navigation for interest and intent. A person who visits a general product page and remains for 15 seconds receives a lower PTP score than another visitor who navigates to specific product and pricing information and stays much longer.

Suppose there are two visitors with high PTP scores: a recent college graduate interested in debt management and a more established empty nester in the market for wealth management and retirement planning. Based on user preferences, complexity of needs, and opportunity value, intelligent decisioning routes the opportunity through digital or staff channels. It engages them with offers, education, and helpful tools through email, texts, retargeted advertising, or phone calls, making the most of staff usage.

Connects workflow provides critical, real-time transparency to managers using insights gathered from origination, decisioning, processing, and closing.

• Real-Time Monitoring: Managers can track the entire loan process in real-time to identify bottlenecks and drill down into specific units of work to determine root causes.
• SLA Tracking: The system tracks the status of loan applications against service-level agreements (SLAs), generating alerts for those nearing or past defined levels.
• Drill-Down Views: Managers can view in-flight deals by channel, loan type, teams, and responsible staff, allowing them to pinpoint the root causes of SLA breaches and apply timely remediation.
• Proactive Notifications: Managers can deploy real-time notifications via SMS or email regarding the health of the overall loan pipeline.

When automation detects needs early and then makes decisions based on the opportunity, the FI is equipped to engage with timely and relevant content. Sales performance management tools equip the team to make the most of every opportunity. Automation routes engagement through digital and staff channels based on the complexity of the need and its value, optimizing resource usage. Technology delivers quantifiable value.

The fulfillment path includes a complex series of steps. Done well, neither the banker nor the consumer “feels” the complexity because automation does the heavy lifting.

The process begins in the early stages of the customer journey, identifying customer needs and tracking the sales lead. When a lead results in an account opening, information is seamlessly transitioned into the fulfillment process. This end-to-end process includes accelerators for data capture, customer verification, due diligence, automated decisioning, document completion, and account funding. Real-time and workflow-based exception processing ensures a compliant and consistent process across all channels, with core integration for booking new accounts. Automated onboarding directs follow-up and transitions the customer to account usage.

Customer survey feedback loops allow customers to share their experiences and raise concerns or complaints to the institution. Feedback from service interactions can be used to enhance and streamline processes and make the customer feel “heard.” If the feedback presents an opportunity, automation routes the response through digital or staff channels with campaigns based on the nature of the feedback, opportunity value, and the probability of campaign success. Negative feedback may trigger a call from a banker or other follow-up action.

CX success hinges on functional scope in the channel of choice, intuitive processes, and successful outcomes.

Customers usually provide insight into their experience if asked. Often, institutions fail to request feedback in a timely and targeted manner. Since only one in 26 customers will let you know why they leave, listening to customers to predict and prevent attrition is critical.

For example, customers respond negatively to:

• A poorly designed website that includes cumbersome navigation, difficult searches, slow response time, insufficient depth, or low value, unhelpful content.
• Lingering unresolved issues.
• Inability to complete tasks in their channel of choice or being forced to ‘channel shift.’
• Inadequate access to help from staff.
• One-size-fits-all engagement.
• A barrage of irrelevant information.

If customers continually fail or find it too difficult to achieve their goals or execute tasks, their negative emotional experience leads them to end their relationship with the FI.

Early detection of dissatisfaction can mitigate loss. A digital solution with the necessary detection framework can identify areas needing improvement based on customer insight and proactive engagement to protect the relationship.

A modern customer delivery strategy uses the advantages of each channel within an omnichannel delivery model and is proactive in all five stages of the customer journey. Such a model enhances visibility of the customer journey with tools to increase competitiveness within an economic framework. It increases precision and improves:

• Customer experience with early needs detection
• Engagement
• Abandonment retargeting
• Attrition risk mitigation

It uses data and analytics to allocate resources to high-probability opportunities, increasing success and reducing waste.

FIs expand revenue, optimize branch usage, and reduce risk. They leverage technology for quantification, decisioning, workflow, and customer knowledge expansion. Cornerstones for success include:

• Proactive, automated lead generation and customer engagement
• Accommodation for customer fulfillment and abandonment recovery
• Omnichannel workflow for improved customer service and operational efficiency
• Risk detection and mitigation capability
• Management insight KPIs for informed decisions and excellence in execution

Such a model uses data as an asset for data-driven actions and leverages its time-awareness to provide timely and relevant consumer responses.

Our customers reduce risk through systematic controls. These controls strengthen the bank’s governance and compliance by automating business rules, policies, calculations, and disclosures.

A series of best practices mitigates customer risk for customer identification, authentication, fraud prevention, and due diligence. The solution mitigates attrition risk with a predictive model and proactive campaigns.

The solution safeguards the FI from credit risk exposure through consistent credit bureau, debt, and financial analysis. Institution-specific policies, rules, and pricing strategies are consistently executed. Automated application decisioning increases productivity by allowing staff to focus on creditworthy applicants. Non-qualified applicant satisfaction is increased by initiating education campaigns to strengthen financial well-being.

Our customers reduce operational and transactional risk through process automation. This includes SLA management, audit logs, and real-time fraud prevention. Operational reliability remains high through proactive monitoring and operating KPIs.

Technology enforces compliance by automating analysis, disclosures, and credit decisioning. It provides proof of process for audit and regulatory examination. This strengthens the institution’s compliance posture.

The damage caused to an institution’s brand and reputation due to failure to mitigate risk can be swift and devastating. According to a Finacle report, reputational risk is ‘felt in no uncertain terms as negative publicity, litigation, loss of revenue, clients, partners, and key employees, decline in share price, and difficulty in recruiting talent. Risk management automation safeguards the FI’s balance sheet and valued trust with its community of stakeholders.

The role of the banker is evolving from primarily helping customers with transactions to advice and planning by meeting immediate and longer-term needs. Key sales tools supporting this evolving role include:

• Referrals management
• Customer engagement campaigns
• Contact tracking and call planning
• Book of Business
• Scheduled appointments

Digital adoption reduces the amount of time staff spend with customers. Having a consolidated view of all customer information and activity in one place helps staff make the most of each interaction. The 360-degree view includes information obtained through digital and staff channels, such as:

• Products of interest and propensity to purchase derived through digital sensory and staff input
• Self-disclosed financial goals from Accumulator, the digital financial planning solution
• Satisfaction scores from intelligent surveys
• Digital and staff engagement
• Upcoming appointments and topics of interest submitted through the online scheduler
• Calculated attrition risk

This provides bankers with powerful visibility into the customer’s needs and the state of the relationship, enabling them to improve the level of service. It also equips staff to enhance the customer experience by focusing on needs and long-term goals, deepening the relationship, and building trust.

Successful sales and marketing campaigns help FIs detect needs, educate and influence consumers early in the customer journey, acquire and convert leads, and expand relationships. A successful campaign strategy includes six best practice pillars:

1. Message relevance drives campaigns based on known customer needs and interests.
2. Target audience selection ensures the right individual or customer population segment receives the right message.
3. Breadth of distribution options optimize the use of digital technology and staff.
4. Calls-to-action provide customers easy access to offers, education, financial planning, and online appointment scheduling.
5. Customer follow-up equips the institution with valuable customer feedback to gauge satisfaction with processes, products, and services.
6. Management insight metrics empower ongoing process improvement.

Successful campaigns enhance customer experience through strategic, customer-centric engagement.

Customers want to be known and expect the institution to:

• Interact in a timely, proactive, stress-free, and frictionless manner
• Empower consumers for financial control
• Live up to its promise
• Provide choices, consistency, and timeliness
• Listen and respond quickly
• Deliver relevant content
• Streamline interactions
• Help them reach their financial goals

Management insight uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to pinpoint root causes of performance, both positive and negative, using correlation analysis and drill-down and drill-through functionality. Root cause analysis provides actionable insight into performance strategy optimization.

Connects lending provides insight for:

Customer

• Abandonment conversions
• Engagement performance
• NPS and CSAT

Operations

• Service‑level agreements (SLAs)
• E-Sign adoption
• E-Sign completion

Revenue

• Look-to-book ratios
• Sales performance

Risk

• Exception monitoring
• Credit risk

Recent studies indicate that more than 80 percent of Americans experience some level of financial stress, and over 75 percent want help with financial management. With high consumer demand for such help, Accumulator, the personal financial planning tool, presents banks with a great opportunity to listen and respond.

With a goal-centric self-service tool, the customer selects primary and secondary goals, including meeting monthly expenses, housing, transportation, education, or retirement. The tool stores these goals, increasing system and banker knowledge about the customer, including income, expenses, assets, and debt.

Goals and financial position allow automation to direct appropriate engagement plans through digital and staff channels. This allows the FI to respond in a timely and relevant manner. The FI can then rapidly offer product education, refer customers with complex needs to specialists, and build trust and loyalty.

Gathered knowledge improves the range and accuracy of data-driven actions. The customer data platform (CDP) stores this vital information to improve acquisition through relevant engagement. CDP stores prospect and customer information gathered throughout the customer journey. This enables targeted campaigns, relevant marketing, and concise banker insight to increase acquisition success.

ARGO’s CDP begins building a record by identifying a website guest. It associates data using digital sensory and browsing patterns, needs detection, and a propensity-to-purchase score. Once a guest registers by providing a name and email address, they are converted into a prospect. The CDP merges data and builds the record until the prospect becomes a customer. The solution identifies and authenticates the customer and generates a CIF record as part of the fulfillment process. It collects additional data as the relationship grows.

Information includes records of events and feedback. Based on signals from digital and self-disclosed sources, CDP maintains an attrition risk score used to determine the need for targeted engagement to reduce the risk of loss. In addition, stored goals and financial information from the self-service financial planners suggest near- and long-term revenue opportunities.

Loan applicants across the credit spectrum increasingly expect loan decisions in real-time. Speed and convenience have become major purchase criteria. If applicants don’t receive timely decisions and updates, they abandon the process. Competitors, often non-traditional lenders, then capture market share. The shift to digital brings an increase in volume as consumers shop around. It also attracts lower-credit-quality applicants. To remain competitive, lenders can transition from traditional underwriting processes to automated credit analysis, decisioning, pricing, workflow, and SLA tracking. Automation positions lenders to compete for and win loan business.

Challenges of traditional underwriting include:

• High overhead
• Operational inefficiencies
• Biases
• Inconsistencies

Benefits of automation include:

• Accelerated decision speed
• Strengthened governance and compliance
• Mitigated credit risk
• Increased efficiencies

Let’s take a case of 1,000 new account attempts. Using abandonment rates commonly seen in the industry today means that you have 800 abandoned and only 200 fulfilled. Instantly, you’ve not only lost 800 possible accounts but also any new customers associated with them. Worse, you may have a diminished reputation with them. Using an industry average annual value of $500 per account, we can monetize the impact. If you target and capture 30 percent of the abandonments with quick recovery and engagement, the value is clear. Look at the math:

30 percent x 800 recover opportunities = 240 new accounts

240 accounts X $500 = $120,000 revenue

The revenue is realized just from abandonment detection, recovery, and retargeting per 1,000 attempts.

ARGO places digital in an omnichannel delivery structure with measures, such as:

• Human cognition-based UI/UX for self-service delivery
• Website sensory points for needs detection and engagement
• Frictionless account fulfillment with access to staff help
• Abandonment detection and reengagement
• Data-driven automated decisioning with back-office review when needed
• Customer identity verification and fraud detection
• Channel collaboration with the ability to start in one channel and finish in another

To stay competitive in today’s markets, brands must overcome digital challenges and create new opportunities. Solutions must include risk detection and mitigation, automation controls and efficiency, staff access, and customer experience with reduced marginal cost.

Referrals drive high-quality leads in the sales pipeline and improve sales conversion rates.

Sales opportunity flow includes:

• Banker goal performance
• Prospecting from bankers, digital leads, referrals, and third-party source
• Pipeline forecasting
• Banker’s book of business
• Customer engagement
• Fulfillment

Key factors for referral program success include:

• Accurate information about the consumers’ needs
• Timeliness of follow-up responses
• Routing to the most effective responder
• Staff performance goals
• Measuring program success

We have reviewed dozens of studies, including those conducted by survey companies such as J.D. Power and major consulting firms. We identified a concrete list of factors that contribute to and detract from a positive customer experience (CX). The five pillars of CX include:

• Frictionless: The intuitive UI enables customers to navigate a process to completion. Helpful prompts and data prefill streamline the process, allowing customers to finish business quickly. UX must amplify known consumer ‘satisfiers’ and remove sources of friction. This applies across all five customer journey stages. Integrated omnichannel functionality empowers users to seamlessly move between channels.
• Personalization: Seventy-five percent of consumers expect engagement to be contextualized and personalized based on prior interactions. Engagement must be proactive, relevant, and timely.
• Guidance: The goal-centric self-service financial planning tool allows users to take the first steps to financial health. Nearly 80% of Americans need help with general financial knowledge and goal planning. This tool enables users to explore goals such as saving for a major event or retirement, purchasing a home or car, or becoming debt free. In just a few minutes, through self-service or staff-assisted channels, they can create a custom plan to meet their goals. Peer comparisons, a what-if calculator, and educational content guide the user from dreams to met goals.
• Empowerment: Users want the convenience and empowerment of being able to do it themselves. For example, Me­gan wants to review her new checking account and order checks on her tablet. She realizes she has a question about the account and would like to call the contact center. Agents have a 360-degree view of her contact and account information, service requests, and satisfaction scores. The agent answers Megan’s questions and proactively asks if she’d like help getting credit for her new business. Megan appreciates the simple access through digital and the helpful support of staff. Later, the system sends her a survey to make sure the agent met all her needs. Her responses become part of her profile, making ongoing engagement always relevant.
• Trust: Customers want to know they can transact their business safely. Comprehensive risk management crosses five categories, including:
• Customer risk—Validating consumer and business identity and attrition factors.
• Credit risk—Protecting the institution from loss due to bad debt.
• Operational and transactional risk—Ensuring internal controls, operational reliability, and workflow management for transaction processing.
• Compliance risk—Operating within a complex and constantly evolving regulatory environment.
• Reputational risk—Protecting the institution against damage to the brand and community standing.

Digital self-service for loans increases volumes but produces low-credit-quality applicants. As many as 90 percent of digital credit requests are non-viable. The increased volume and decreased value can rapidly overwhelm an FI’s staff when using traditional lending models. Processing loan applications through intelligent decisioning before assigning them to staff minimizes labor and vendor costs, mitigates credit risk, strengthens customer engagement, and ensures regulatory compliance.

Retail Lending uses best practices for processing applications through intelligent decisioning for:

1. Data quality for field-level controls, address normalizations, and user-guided content.
2. Pre-bureau checks for known internal fraud and charge-offs, OFAC, and geographic misalignment.
3. Post-bureau checks for thin credit files, derogatory credit, bankruptcies, garnishments, legal proceedings, foreclosures, repossessions, and fraud flags.
4. Automated underwriting for credit scoring, debt-to-income analysis, compliant calculations, and policy evaluations.
5. Market segment, relationship, and product for workflow routing, targeted offers, and special pricing.

Automated decisioning results in low-cost denial processing to offset lower applicant quality from internet channels.

Connects lending provides a competitive advantage in an omnichannel world. Connects provides seamless origination, decisioning, processing, and closing for all types of consumer and business loans. The solution improves efficiencies and streamlines customer-to-banker collaboration.

Connects lending:

• Simplifies the loan origination process by guiding customers and staff members through each phase, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing close rates.
• Increases accuracy by eliminating data rekeying, which reduces errors and oversights.
• Mitigates credit risk through automation of applicant, credit, collateral, and compliance analysis, providing decision outcomes and recommendations.
• Improves customer engagement by triggering staff actions and automating workflows.
• Enhances customer experience by reducing paper-based processes across channels.
• Strengthens governance, risk, and compliance by establishing consistent processes aligned to bank policy and regulatory requirements.
• Improves communication timeliness to stakeholders for in-flight loan applications.
• Equips bankers with 360-degree customer visibility to manage and expand relationships and target product recommendations aligned to customer needs.
• Improves management insight through robust drill-down and drill-through KPIs, reporting, and visualization dashboards.
• Increases staff productivity and efficiency through analytics and workflow to balance allocation of technology and human resources based on customer need type and complexity.
• Reduces booking errors and inconsistencies by automating the loan boarding process to the servicing platform.

Technology enables the FI to listen and respond to prospects and customers in an omnichannel world. Active listening helps the FI remain customer-connected.

Automation:

• Detects website presence to listen to consumer needs.
• Discovers new product needs based on self-disclosed financial goals or life events.
• Automates engagement tailored to meet specific needs over time.
• Personalizes responses based on customer knowledge and segmentation.
• Asks the right questions at the right time through intelligent surveys.
• Balances customer self-service and staff help to enhance CX.
• Retargets abandoned processes by saving partially completed applications and sending links for the customer to resume. This simplifies re-engagement for the customer and captures otherwise lost opportunities.
• Strengthens brand awareness to expand relationships and increase loyalty.
• Supports the need for education by deploying timely and relevant content.
• Predicts and reduces attrition to preserve and expand relationships.

Active listening begins in the early stages of the customer journey. It identifies signals, learns about customer interests, employs data-driven decisions, and applies predictive analytics to accurately understand customer needs.

Financial institutions provide a significant advantage today with a human touch. Customers prefer the convenience of digital but highly value access to staff and financial expertise. As the transactional role diminishes, customer service and advisory roles become more prominent. While digital offers many benefits, the one gap it cannot address is trust. Human interaction drives trust and remains highly valued by customers. For example, branch and contact center personnel play a significant role in customer acquisition, clarifying options, and offering guidance and assistance. They can also focus personal engagement on serving broader needs that require a consultative approach. More complex fulfillment processes can be initiated by customers through digital channels, paused, and resumed with the assistance of staff.

A banker can access a universal desktop that provides seamless access to monetary transactions, services, sales, fulfillment, and advisory support from a single touchpoint. This eliminates customer friction caused by staff having to switch software applications or move to a different physical station, allowing the banker to focus on the customer. The banker can handle the full range of needs from one location.

Contact center staff stands in the gap between digital and branch services by providing issue resolution and direct support of digital channels. Contact center agents can access digital account applications to answer questions and resolve issues without needing to switch between platforms. This allows them to increase satisfaction and reduce call times as they focus on the customer.

Pillars of an Omni delivery model include:

• Fully integrated staff in an Omni delivery strategy. This starts with a universal desktop, allowing staff to perform any function in a branch, including sales, monetary, fulfillment, and service. The customer has access to staff services that are fully integrated with the digital solution.
• Access to robust customer data with channel information available across the enterprise, including banker insights.
• Omni workflow with start-stop cross-channel fulfillment. Staff can take over and complete requests that began in self-service digital channels.
• Automated appointment scheduling and follow-up reminders to provide convenient access to skilled employee resources and minimize no-shows.
• Blended automated and human onboarding, often driven by market segment and/or customer value index, to ensure ‘we get it right.’

Omnichannel delivery processes use automated and staff interfaces to respond to customer needs, improve service, increase satisfaction, enhance experience, and provide guidance for consumer and business segments.

Consumers expect you to connect with them in ways they see as valuable and helpful based on their needs. A successful acquisition strategy hinges on detecting needs early in the awareness and consideration stages of the customer journey and providing relevant and personalized engagement to meet those needs.

Intelligent lead generation (ILG) detects, quantifies, and engages prospects from their first website touch. It identifies and measures interest and intent to meet needs with targeted engagement. ILG reaches and converts opportunities through digital channels. It drives traffic to the website, generates prospect leads, scores interest, and deploys engagement.

To accomplish this, we deliver automation to achieve the following:

• Early prospect detection.
• Predictive propensity scoring.
• Next-best-action decisioning.
• Relevant and timely engagement.
• Customer journey tracking.
• KPI-based management insight.

A VOC model operates at a low marginal cost to gather timely feedback, enhancing products, processes, and brand sentiment over time. The four-step cycle includes:

• Targeting the audience that will provide the most valuable feedback based on segment, demographics, risk factors, events, or personal or business customer types.
• Asking relevant questions to gather feedback through relational, transactional, and clarifying intent surveys.
• Interpreting the feedback to identify trends and root causes.
• Employ corrective actions such as reaching out to a frustrated customer, coaching staff, improving processes, and modifying products and services. VOC models are only effective when the customer feels ‘heard’ and the institution takes action.

Validating that the chosen action was successful requires follow-up feedback. This makes the VOC model cyclical: reaching out to the target audience, asking questions, interpreting their feedback, and acting on the answers they provide. This knowledge ensures success in retargeting groups and revising survey questions. A customer-centric business model empowers consumers, ensuring they feel heard, known, and valued.

Analytics enable the institution to understand the root causes of friction. At-a-glance views show whether issues are organization-wide or isolated to a specific market, branch, or employee. Drill-down filterable data analysis equips the FI to identify issues and take corrective action.

Business banking is a key growth segment for deposit and loan revenue for most banks. Business lending accounts for more than 30 percent of the nation’s bank loan portfolios, yet the supporting lending processes at most banks are still heavily manual and conducted across disparate solutions.

To win business and grow revenue, business lenders:

• Adopt unified technologies across the business customer journey, through digital and branch channels.
• Offer a balance of self-service and staff support.
• Automate workflows, financial and credit analysis, risk-based pricing, decisioning, peer comparisons, and document generation to streamline operations and improve efficiencies.

Automated decisioning filters applications to reduce the volume needing banker review. Decisioning also standardizes compliance with your business policies and ensures consistency. Automated decisions reduce marginal costs and frees bankers to focus on high-probability, high-value opportunities.

Examples of decisioning factors include:

• Identity verification
• Address verification
• Debit history decisioning
• Credit decisioning
• KYC / OFAC
• Fraud risk
• Attrition risk

Digital brings unique opportunities to expand customer acquisition with earlier and needs-based detection. Customer engagement and assessment must begin in the early stages of the customer journey, specifically awareness and consideration, and encompass all subsequent stages. Brand and product research typically occur digitally rather than in a branch. However, self-service channels introduce risks.

Digital success requires defining the reality of digital channel delivery.

FIs that attempt to narrowly use digital for fulfillment show results come at the cost of lower quality, shorter-term account longevity, and high process abandonment rates. Such a strategy highlights digital’s weakness, leaving real opportunity on the table.

Digitally acquired customers generally represent lower quality and higher risk. Many have lower balances on the deposit side and higher rates of denial on the credit side. The volume-to-quality ratio often increases acquisition costs. Digital becomes an ineffective stand-alone channel.

Gain comes from a blended and integrated approach in an omnichannel world.

Digital contributes to the bottom line:

• Influenced purchasing decisions with early journey stage behavior and needs detection.
• Enhanced lead generation, acquisition, retention, and expansion.
• Improved customer experience with relevant and timely engagement using gathered information, including digital behavior, financial goals, and needs signals.
• Expanded reach with self-service for fulfillment.
• Expanded capacity with lowered marginal cost through automated decisioning and routing to staff.
• Abandonment detection and retargeting to recoup up to 30 percent of lost volume.
• Event-triggered onboarding migrates the customer to account usage.

The traditional sales-centric one-size-fits-all method of lead generation fails to connect with the consumer. It is unable to understand, share, and respond to their needs and sentiments.

Consumers often make purchasing decisions based more on emotion than raw logic. Showing empathy by understanding their needs and personalizing the response increases trust and decreases friction.

Two-way communication improves lead generation. Relevant messages help consumers feel heard. Digital “dialog” with the consumer enhances acquisition, retention, relationship expansion, and customer experience. The institution benefits from customer knowledge, including segmentation and needs. The customer benefits from relevant and need-specific engagement.

Automation provides seamless origination, decisioning, processing, and closing for all types of consumer, real estate, and business loans. The solution improves efficiencies, streamlines engagement, and reduces credit and compliance risk.

FIs gain a competitive advantage by reducing credit risks in an omnichannel world with automation that:

• Strengthens governance and compliance by providing consistent decisioning.
• Reduces operational costs by eliminating rekeying, manual underwriting, and duration.
• Accelerates decision speed through skill-based routing for improved response times.
• Performs applicant, credit, collateral, policies, and rules evaluations, providing consistent decisions and recommendations.
• Positions lenders to win loan business in a timely, safe, sound, and profitable manner.
• Improves customer and staff experience by providing real-time decisions and appropriate and timely routing of tasks, alerts, actions, and responses.
• Eliminates inconsistency and bias by decisioning each loan applicant using the same standards.
• Ensures loans are priced according to the established risk and return parameters.
• Generates and presents summaries of loan requests and key metrics, allowing staff to make effective recommendations for approval, denial, or further review.
• Enables automated decisioning analytics for ongoing rules analysis and re-calibration to optimize decisioning.
• Reduces unit operating cost by allowing underwriters to focus on high-value opportunities.

ARGO’s Compliance team, with decades of institutional and regulatory experience, monitors and maintains the solution to ensure compliance with the latest rules and regulations. Connects reduces credit and compliance risk to align with the FI’s goals, objectives, and risk appetite.

Automation detects and tracks customer events to identify ‘moments of truth’ on a micro basis. These include system-detected events and banker-initiated actions. Population segmentation uses patterns and predictive insights for macro-level initiation. In either case, these trigger the start of the VOC lifecycle.

VOC uses event attributes and analytics to determine what, if any, action is warranted. If the action requires customer feedback, VOC deploys the appropriate survey. Results are analyzed, providing actionable insight. Based on the feedback, additional engagement may be initiated. Over time, this iterative process keeps the institution fully engaged in the customer’s experience.

VOC listens to key touchpoints, is more sensitive to your customer’s environment, and drives timely actions. One-way and two-way engagement with customers ensures leadership stays abreast of expectations and focuses on customer experience in today’s digital landscape. VOC drives timely, relevant, and coordinated engagement and distributes content at a low marginal cost.

Intelligent lead generation (ILG) increases the FI’s competitive advantage and improves outcomes. ILG detects, identifies, measures, engages, and tracks prospects in the early stages of the customer journey. It reshapes customer experience through data-driven decisioning to drive relevant and timely engagement. It informs leaders with metrics that measure success and failure at all levels of the enterprise across channels. KPIs provide measurable performance and revenue lift compared to legacy systems.

ILG:

• Gathers early customer behavioral information through digital sensory receptors.
• Engages based on analytics to reduce waste on low probability opportunities.
• Uses accumulated customer knowledge to deploy personalized and relevant engagement.
• Routes leads through automated and staff channels based on quality, priority, and value.
• Reduces customer friction with targeted engagement.
• Increases consistency in an omnichannel environment.
• Creates a 360-degree view of prospects and customers for the duration of the relationship.
• Optimizes staff utilization through automated workflow routing.
• Provides KPIs to improve processes over time.

ARGO’s omnichannel strategy offers a blend of digital and staff access for the bank’s lending customers. For example, a business customer begins by researching the bank’s business loan products. They start a loan application through a digital channel, but then leave before it’s complete. The solution saves progress, ensuring that any abandoned application can be swiftly retargeted. The customer can then continue from where they left off through any channel, whether digital or with the aid of branch or contact center staff.

The business client profile identifies individuals associated with the business, including authorized individuals, entity owners, or principals. The link between individuals and the business identifies and authenticates customers working in digital channels, ensuring relevant engagement and audit trails. This provides the convenience your business customers want.

Embedded image capture and workflow enable tellers to capture 100 percent of transactions at the teller line. The Electronic Journal logs all actions performed on an item once captured. This journal provides a complete, detailed audit trail that tracks the chain of custody of a physical item from the point of presentment through posting. Automated workflow enables communication between the front office and the back office.

Tellers can perfect 95-98 percent of transactions presented in the branch. Only two to five percent of items are routed to the back office, allowing the institution to reduce the time needed to release all branch work to posting by several hours. In some cases, institutions go to posting in as little as one hour after the last branch closes. Because most transactions are perfected on a transaction-by-transaction basis while the customer is present, institutions reduce adjustment rates by 89-90 percent and decrease write-offs by up to 85 percent.

Back-office personnel review, balance, and perfect transactions effectively. If an item is unreadable or if more details are needed, an operator can make a silent, electronic request to the teller’s capturing workstation for a grayscale image. This approach minimizes the requirements for transmitting images and limits the need for further action from the teller. In addition, operators use bidirectional communication for image and tape rescan requests and Electronic Journal inquiries. The solution’s workflow monitoring continually tracks and manages the transaction flow.

The type and volume of branch and contact center transactions are changing as digital delivery expands. Remaining competitive requires a new business model that responds to these changes in consumer behavior and expectations.

While some consumers and small businesses still prefer to visit the branch for simple transactions, such as cash needs, many no longer rely on branches for routine transactions and service requests. Consumers still value the local branch, but they increasingly use it for complex transactions, issue resolution, and advisory services. In today’s Omnichannel world, customers want the ability to easily move between self-service, banker-assisted, and full-service options. True integration of digital and staff channels to create an omnichannel experience has become a vital part of the customer satisfaction equation.

This changing business model led FIs to use a variety of staff usage approaches to serve customers, including bankers who are centralized, branch-based, and mobile. A solution must provide a high-quality customer experience with the flexibility to meet needs across all banker channels.

A universal desktop that provides seamless access to monetary transactions, services, sales, fulfillment, and advisory support from a single touchpoint. This eliminates customer friction caused by switching software applications or moving to a different physical station, allowing the banker to focus on the customer. The banker can handle the full range of needs from a single location.

FIs can offer self-service and banker-assisted financial planning and advice to help customers wth a goal-centric approach to both short-term and long-term achievement. This provides the FI with valuable insight into customer needs. In addition, it enables customers to manage their financial journey and define a pathway to wealth accumulation.

In under 15 minutes, consumers identify their top two financial goals, provide financial information, and receive feedback to help them achieve their goals. They can access a library of financial education at their convenience and through their preferred channel.

Common goals include:

• Budgeting
• Purchasing a car or home
• Improving credit
• Reducing debt
• Saving for a significant event such as a wedding or dream vacation
• Planning for higher education, such as college or trade school
• Protecting the family with life insurance and estate planning
• Planning for retirement

With guided prompts, helpful information, what-if calculators, and peer comparisons, consumers can set and meet realistic goals.

Contact center staff stand in the gap between digital and branch services by providing issue resolution and direct support of digital channels. Contact center agents can access digital account applications to answer customer questions and complete the application process. These agents can resolve issues without needing to switch between platforms. With full access to the client’s profile, they can increase satisfaction and reduce call times as they focus on the customer.

Connects uses industry best practices to calculate and analyze key metrics. These include balance sheet and income statement essential line items, as well as industry-expected summary data such as tangible net worth, EBITDA, cash flow, and working capital. The solution calculates industry-standard ratios for liquidity, coverage, operating expense to sales, and leverage. These key metrics are directly aligned with the Risk Management Association (RMA) Annual Statement Studies ratios, generating peer comparisons and benchmark analysis. This enables lenders to assess loan and portfolio risk and advise business borrowers on how to become stronger and more financially sound.

While there are many similarities, FIs face unique complexity with their business customers compared to their consumers. Business customers range in size and structure, and they require more complex processing, needs handling, fulfillment and credit options, and risk management. A successful omnichannel solution scales to meet these needs, balancing automation and staff resources.

Automation meets these challenges through:

• Expanded information gathering and customer segmentation for timely and relevant engagement.
• Enhanced deposit services, including monetary processing for currency handling, night deposits, declared value deposits, and transaction processing.
• Automated credit workflow and processing to accommodate complex business models and deal structures.
• Strengthened risk management with robust positive pay and fraud prevention.

Revenue is driven by identifying and fulfilling customer needs at the right time, which requires customer experience, data insights, and trust. Different market segments have different needs, ranging from insurance protection to investment to financial planning. Advisory needs and life-stage events include:

• Financial education
• Budgeting
• Improving credit and debt management
• Saving for significant purchases or events
• Credit utilization
• College planning
• Retirement planning
• Insurance and estate planning

Affluent segments typically have specialty advisory services that are not cost-effective to provide to mass retail and small business markets. Branch and contact center staff can identify and refer emerging affluent customers to a more specialized resource to provide financial and sustainability guidance.

For the general population, perhaps the greatest need is personal financial planning 101 for debt reduction, retirement planning, educational savings, auto and home purchases, and expense management. Providing self-service and/or banker-led guidance can help your customers improve their financial well-being while generating incremental revenue.

The customer data platform segments businesses based on a range of criteria. Data points include NAICS and SIC industry codes, geography, business entity structure, and event-driven behavior.

Automation streamlines the process of managing the relationship. The solution links businesses, related entities, owners, and contacts, and captures beneficial owners for each entity when needed.

According to the most recent ABA Deposit Account Fraud Survey Report, the estimated fraud loss against deposit accounts is $2.8 billion annually. Forgeries and counterfeits each accounted for 29 percent of that loss, followed by 25 percent Return Deposit Items (RDIs), and 8 percent alterations (11 percent were categorized as ‘other’).

At 49 percent, over-the-counter (OTC) is the channel with the greatest loss, followed by Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) at 30 percent and ATM at 12 percent. Based on these statistics  ARGO’s solution directly improves fraud detection and predictive accuracy.

The best leads with the highest conversion rates come from referrals. Reports from SalesIntel highlight this with the following statistics:

• 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know.
• Referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads from other channels.
• 90% of marketers say that referral programs generate a high volume of quality leads.
• 54% say that referral programs have a lower cost-per-lead than other channels.
• Marketers rate referrals as the second-highest source of quality leads.

Acquiring customers and expanding relationships requires qualified sales staff to pursue high-propensity opportunities. To ensure success, these opportunities are best identified in the early stages of the customer journey.

In the awareness and consideration stages of the journey, referrals drive lead generation based on the institution’s in-person and digital engagement with consumers. Referral capabilities become an embedded part of the sales and service process, efficiently capture leads, identify the right teams or individuals to pursue the potential opportunity through fulfillment, and track outcomes through key performance indicators for management insight.

With sophisticated fraudsters conducting repetitive, small-deposit account transaction fraud attempts, it is increasingly difficult for financial institutions to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. To successfully thwart these attempts, it is important to start prevention at the point of disbursement and with automated verification and fraud detection at all points in the clearing process. ARGO’s investment in newer generation technology to detect fraud creates two quantifiable results:

• Automation with Improved detection accuracy
• Optimized labor utilization

The solution breaks check fraud detection down into these key areas:

• Transaction Analysis—Processes debits and credits contained in deposits and withdrawals and identifies suspicious items, such as out-of-range check numbers and check amounts and duplicate check numbers. The solution also applies tests at the account and entity levels, measuring such things as account velocity, account volume, and deposits or withdrawals of unusual amounts. It assigns test scores, which determine whether to flag items as being suspicious.
• Check Stock Validation—Analyzes check images against historical images, validating the consistency and accuracy of check stock. The solution identifies counterfeit inclearing and over-the-counter checks faster and more accurately than visual review.
• Signature Verification—Uses machine learning and decision trees to analyze check signatures. It compares digitized signatures to referenced images, manages multiple signatories on the same account, and monitors items requiring dual signatures on personal and business accounts. It focuses on dynamic aspects of the signing action, such as signature fragments, handwriting trajectories, and geometric analytics. It produces confidence scoring based on these aspects.
• Alteration Detection—Uses artificial intelligence (AI) “deep learning” models to compare check attributes and features against each other to identify potentially washed or altered fields, particularly in the payee and legal amount fields. Analyzes handwriting to identify style traits. AI models trained on a large, diverse dataset of handwriting samples enable them to learn and recognize a wide range of styles.

The ACH network facilitates several payment types, each with its own risks and dedicated detection methods. OASIS processes and monitors both incoming and outgoing NACHA files.

One of the key risks to consider when processing outgoing ACH payments causing serious loss to bank customers is account takeover. Criminals use schemes like phishing, theft of credentials, malware, and social engineering to gain access to the systems of a bank’s business customer, ultimately leading to account takeover to initiate unauthorized ACH transactions.

A less intrusive but increasingly common scheme is executive impersonation fraud, or ‘CEO fraud,’ where a fraudster sends a fake email with access to the company bank account to an employee. The email appears to come from an executive or key business relation requesting an urgent funds transfer.

While financial institutions take measures to protect their payment systems and networks, it is much harder to prevent and detect account takeover on the customer side. IT security and awareness differ per customer, and a determined attacker easily finds a weak link. Robust authentication procedures and detection systems monitoring location, session, and device information form an essential first layer of defense against account takeover, but they are not sufficient. A fraudulent transaction may be initiated by a malware-controlled system of the actual customer or properly authenticated by a misguided employee.

OASIS employs several methods on each outgoing ACH transfer to protect the customer and the institution against account takeover:

• OASIS verifies whether the account should be allowed to initiate an ACH transaction, make an international (IAT) transfer, or have debits or credits posted on it through ACH at all.
• OASIS applies outlier models to flag payments that are out of pattern for this account or customer, and it checks for known suspicious patterns like an initial penny transfer to test access and bank controls.
• OASIS scores outgoing payments based on the receiving account’s reputation:
  • Does this account have a history of doing business with the counterparty account?
  • How many other accounts in the bank have had transfers to or from that counterparty account?
  • How often were those payments disputed, not paid, or reported as fraudulent?

OASIS performs fraud risk scoring on deposits and withdrawals, with specific detection algorithms for each type of check, such as on-us, transit, treasury checks, and local government checks. For a deposit, OASIS applies transaction and image analysis on each item in the deposit. It then combines this with configurable scorecards, calculating the risk of the parties involved in the transaction. It analyzes more than 60 parameters covering the conductor, beneficiary, issuing account, and items to produce a single fraud score. It then provides the teller operator with an appropriate interdiction message, including a hold recommendation, giving the bank the option to accept the deposit, covering the fraud and other collectability risks by holding the funds.

Transit checks have traveled to a different bank from the one that holds its funds, making it difficult for the receiving institution to determine whether the checks are bad. Even more challenging is knowing in real time to place appropriate holds.

OASIS employs analytics to assess the likelihood of a transit item’s return by scoring characteristics of the check, the originating and depository accounts, the balanced transaction, the conductor, and the transaction context. A collectability model uses the individual scores to determine the appropriate hold schedule. An optimal hold schedule is adaptive, conforming to Reg CC, but is superior, as it optimizes loss avoidance and customer satisfaction through funds availability even though the account the check draws on has not been validated to have sufficient funds.

Transit item analysis includes transaction analysis and image analysis, scoring each deposit item. This score is combined with scores from the analysis of the depositing account, overall daily activity of the conductor, the entity profile, and other overriding bank policies to calculate a score used to recommend the appropriate hold amounts and conditions.

OASIS AML enables compliance officers to learn more about customers by providing automated risk analysis at account opening and throughout the customer relationship.

• Risk Profile Creation: It offers due diligence tools for due diligence to create risk profiles based on customer details, watch-list searches, and key risk indicators.
• Data Analysis: It analyzes customer data based on attributes like products and services used, type of business, income, and address demographics.
• Cross-Referencing: It cross-references government lists like OFAC, along with blacklists and whitelists from the bank and law enforcement.
• Customer Monitoring List (CML): High-risk customers are placed on CMLs. Criteria include whether they’ve had multiple SAR files, are in high-crime areas, operate cash-based businesses, are cash-intensive businesses, or have multiple residences.
• Risk Rating: the solution combines these analysis points to produce a composite risk-based customer rating.

According to a recent ABA report, 49 percent of fraud occurs over the counter (OTC). The ability to accurately detect fraud in real time reduces loss and the reputational cost of customer offense due to false positives.

ARGO Teller Payments Fraud evaluates teller transactions at the point of presentment. It provides transaction, image, and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) analysis. It monitors for cash aggregation, internal and external fraud, and transactional fraud.

• Real-Time Interdiction: Online real-time transaction processing provides interdiction messages, alerting frontline personnel of suspicious activity.
• Automated Action: Automatic holds, warning messages, and transaction denial capabilities enable the FI to protect funds.
• Risk Removal: The automated decisions remove the teller’s responsibility to interpret scores and make difficult decisions.

No. Automation interprets fraud analysis results and returns transaction decisions, so the teller doesn’t have to. The system places necessary holds or directs the teller to accept the transaction or perform appropriate teller or supervisor overrides. Automation routes fraud alerts directly to the back office for adjudication by trained fraud analysts.

Major fundamental structural design and depth of machine learning competency paved the way to this significant improvement. Our five structural pillars include:

1. Using multiple machine learning methods to improve fraud pattern recognition. New machine learning innovation significantly improves both pattern recognition and predictability.
2. Using ‘sensory monitors’ for key event, outlier, and threshold recognition.
3. Considering a larger relevant contextual data universe in machine learning predictive decisioning.
4. Deploying a combination of transactional data and image analysis data in the scoring mechanism.
5. Improving disposition electronic workflow efficiency.

The combination of these five factors, designed and developed over four years, resulted in an OASIS framework that more than doubles the fraud detection results over the legacy rules-based systems, which has been the de facto industry standard.

OASIS addresses several cost components needed to run a fraud detection operation, such as reducing:

• The cost of fraud through better detection capabilities.
• The cost of FTEs needed to review an unnecessarily high number of false alerts.
• The cost to run multiple systems from detection to disposition.

In a traditional environment, reducing fraud loss requires increasing the load on fraud analysts, decreasing customer satisfaction as they are denied rapid access to funds, and increasing pressure on front-line staff to balance the needs of the institution and the customer. OASIS provides a multi-fund, cross-channel analysis platform to detect fraudulent items, fraudulent transactions, and money laundering activities with an integrated interface for adjudicating suspect items. With OASIS, institutions enhance operational efficiency through increased accuracy, simplified adjudication and case management, management insights, and KPIs, as well as multimedia staff training.

Self-Authenticated Negotiable Documents (SAND) delivers a comprehensive treasury management solution with fraud detection and prevention capabilities for commercial checks and electronic payments. SAND empowers financial institutions to help commercial/business customers detect and prevent fraud, giving them more control over payments and funding management. SAND increases detection accuracy by using information only the customer can provide–the details of items issued to payees.

• Detects: Compares and positively matches presented check information against issued check information for exceptions. Probabilistically determines potentially invalid, altered, or counterfeit items. Detects potential ACH fraud based on the customer’s account rules and policies for both debit and credit items.
• Adjudicates: Notifies the customer and the FI of exceptions, presents the item for comparison, escalates items needing immediate attention, and allows the customer or the FI to make pay or no-pay decisions. By reviewing the check image and data from a desktop or mobile device, users determine if the item is valid (pay the check) or fraudulent (return it to the bank).

In addition to the commercial/business customers adjudicating their own items, SAND provides the capability for the FI’s teller to verify the authenticity of a check at the time of presentment. According to a recent ABA Deposit Account Fraud Survey Report, 49 percent of fraud occurs in over-the-counter (OTC) transactions. To combat this fraud in real time and reduce losses, SAND integration capabilities provide check issue information to the teller, allowing comparison to stop fraud before an item is paid.

• Reconciles: Provides the business customer with comprehensive tools enabling control of cash flow and funding management. By reconciling accounts and creating reports for paid items, outstanding items, and detailed summaries spanning specific periods, customers can monitor and make decisions on account activities in real time. Reconciliation details:
  • Outstanding Items—Identifies issued items not paid by end of day or have been issued, stopped, voided, or canceled.
  • Paid Items—Identifies historically cleared items.
  • Account Reconciliation—Lists all items, including paid items matched against issue files for Positive Pay files, Payee Positive Pay files, and ARP issue files. Details include depository, intra-day reconciliation recap, and account reconciliation.

Additionally, for controlled disbursement accounts, also known as Zero Balance accounts, SAND maximizes a business customer’s available cash for investment or debt payments by allowing them to have real-time funding totals on demand in their operating accounts.

• Reports: Provides comprehensive management insight reporting, logging key performance and analytical results to assess risk, monitor adjudication workflow, and ensure operational productivity. Report categories include:
  • Account-based includes all paid, issued, and voided items, ACH transactions accepted (posted/cleared).
  • Operating statistics include daily file processing results and exception tracking.
  • Fraud detection results show the alerted items, corresponding exception reasons, and the disposition results.
  • Security and audit log for all analyst activities and decisions and log of all official items printed.

Customers gain insight to identify root causes and norms, such as the number of alerts each day, the number of suspect items returned or paid, and whether this value is staying the same, increasing, or decreasing over time.

By adopting more modern and flexible methods, institutions can attract and retain high-value corporate customers, generate non-interest service revenue, reduce fraud, and lower operational costs. Positive pay methods supported by SAND include:

• Traditional Positive Pay: Enables check fraud protection by positively matching and validating dollar amounts and serial numbers against information from issued-check files.
• Payee Positive Pay: Fraudsters often alter the payee name on a known, good check to defraud organizations. Pending the verification of the dollar amount, check number, and other details, the solution automatically scans, reads, and matches the payee name printed on the face of the check against the payee information in the issued-check file.
• Reverse Positive Pay: Presents all paid items to the customer for self-service review.
• ACH Positive Pay: Enables customers to create ACH debit blocks and debit filters, which the solution uses to evaluate ACH transactions. The solution enables customers to add or remove ACH vendors or items in real-time. It processes converted checks against the original issue information, generating alerts for altered, mismatched, or duplicated items.
• Fileless (Issueless) Positive Pay: Provides the next generation of ‘fileless’ or ‘issueless’ positive pay, reducing the number of exceptions needing review and increasing document security at the point of presentment. SAND encrypts positive pay information into a two-dimensional barcode printed on the front of the check at issuance. This barcode provides self-authentication and eliminates the need for customers to transmit issued-check files to institutions. A business customer’s third-party vendors, such as title companies or law firms, use official checks to fund loan closings. SAND enables these companies to print secure cashier’s and official checks directly from users’ desktops.

SAND detection methods prevent most check fraud schemes, accounting for 89 percent of all check fraud losses, according to losses reported by the ABA. SAND detects:

• Counterfeits
• Alterations
• Forgeries
• Duplicates
• Invalid MICR lines
• Stale-dated and post-dated checks

Additionally, SAND detects ACH fraud using:

• ACH debit and credit based on ACH blocking and filtering
• OFAC IAT matches

Fraud detection and prevention begins at the point of disbursement and detects potential fraud before the item is paid.

SAND uses deterministic and probabilistic matching to detect and prevent fraud.

Deterministic matching techniques find exact matches between data elements, detecting invalid:

• Amount
• Serial number
• Dates
• Stop Payments
• Duplicates
• Paid checks that were not issued

Probabilistic matching determines the degree of similarity between two or more data elements of a commercial check or electronic payments transaction, detecting invalid, altered, or counterfeit items, by examining:

• Payee – based on semantic matches against issue information using advanced analytical methods such as glyph decomposition or through comparing against data in the encrypted SAND® barcode payee
• Check serial out of range

If a match fails, SAND sends notifications to quickly inform users, who then review the exception and make decisions before the item is paid.