5 Things Banks Can Do Right Now to Protect Older Customers

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Your bank’s most valuable customers are also its most vulnerable.

Americans born before 1965 hold 65% of bank deposits in the U.S., according to the American Bankers Association 2021 Older Americans Benchmarking Report. They are also routinely targeted by criminals: Adults ages 60 and older reported losing more than $600 million to fraud in 2020 alone, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Banks’ role in protecting these customers is quickly becoming codified into law. More than half of states mandate that financial institution’s report suspected elder financial exploitation to local law enforcement, adult protective services or both.

However, banks need to go further to keep older adults’ money safe. Not only will these efforts help retain the large asset base of these valuable customers, but it can drive engagement with their younger family members who are involved in aging loved ones’ financial matters. Banks can do five things to support and protect their older adult customers.

1. Train employees to detect and report elder financial exploitation.
Although most banks train employees to spot elder financial exploitation, there’s confusion around reporting suspected exploitation due to privacy concerns, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And when banks do file reports, they often aren’t filed directly with law enforcement or state Adult Protective Services agencies.

Executives must ensure their bank has clear guidelines for employees on reporting suspected exploitation. Training employees to detect and report fraud can help reduce the amount of money lost to exploitation. A study by AARP and the Virginia Tech Center for Gerontology found that bank tellers who underwent AARP’s BankSafe training reported five times as many suspicious incidents and saved older customers 16 times as much money as untrained tellers did.

2. Use senior-specific technology to monitor for fraud and financial mistakes.
Standard bank alerts don’t go far enough to protect against elder fraud. Banks should offer a financial protection service that:

  • Recognizes senior-specific risks such as unusual transfers, unfamiliar merchants and transactions that could be related to scams.
  • Monitors accounts to determine what is “normal” for each individual.
    Detects changes in transactional behavior and notifies customers of suspicious activity and their own money mistakes.
  • Bank Director identified companies and services, like Carefull, that can offer added protection by analyzing checking, savings and credit card accounts around the clock, creating alerts when encountering signs of fraud and other issues that impact older adults’ finances, such as duplicate or missed payments, behavior change and more.

3. Ensure older customers have trusted contacts.
The CFPB recommends that financial institutions enable older account holders to designate a trusted contact. If your bank isn’t already providing this service, it should. Technology gives banks a way to empower users to add trusted contacts to their accounts or grant varying levels of view-only permissions. This helps banks ensure that their customers’ trusted contacts are informed about any potential suspicious activity. It’s also a way for banks to connect with those contacts and potentially bring them on as new customers.

4. Create content to educate older customers.
Banks should inform older customers how to safeguard their financial well-being. This includes alerting them to scams and providing time-sensitive planning support, video courses and webinars about avoiding fraud.

Banks must also provide older customers with information about planning for incapacity, including the institution’s policy for naming a power of attorney. And banks must accept legally drafted power of attorney documents without creating unnecessary hurdles. Having a policy here allows for this balance.

5. Create an ongoing engagement strategy with older customers.
The days of banks simply shifting older adults to “senior checking accounts” are fading. Banks should take a more active role in engaging with older customers. Failing to do so increases the risk that this valuable customer base could fall victim to fraud, which AARP estimates totals about $50 billion annually.

Banks need a strategy to combine training, technology and content to generate ongoing senior engagement. Working with a trusted partner that has a proven track record of helping banks engage and protect older customers could be the key to implementing this sort of holistic approach.

What Are The Real Risks Of Blockchain?

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blockchain-2-25-19.pngIn the landscape of innovative disruption, the public’s attention is often focused on bitcoin’s impact on financing and investment options. However, it is important to understand that blockchain, the underlying technology often conflated with bitcoin, carries an even greater potential to disrupt many industries worldwide.

The attraction of blockchain technology is its promise to provide an immutable digital ledger of transactions. As such, it is this underlying technology—an open, distributed ledger—that makes monetary and other transactions work.

These transactions can include bitcoin, but they may also include records of ownership, marriage certificates and other instances where the order and permanence of the transaction is important. A blockchain is a secure, permanent record of each transaction that cannot be reversed.

But with all the positive hype about its potential implications, what are the risks to banks?

The Risk With Fintech
One of the most disruptive effects of blockchain will be in financial services. Between building cryptocurrency exchanges and writing digital assets to a blockchain, the innovation that is occurring today will have a lasting effect on the industry.

One of the principles of blockchain technology is the removal of intermediaries. In fintech, the primary intermediary is a bank or other financially regulated entity. If blockchain becomes used widely, that could pose a risk for banks because the regulatory body that works to protect the consumer with regulatory requirements is taken out of the equation.

This disintermediation has a dramatic effect on how fintech companies build their products, and ultimately requires them to take on a greater regulatory burden.

The Risk With Compliance
The first regulatory burden to consider concerns an often-forgotten practice that banks perform on a daily basis known as KYC, or Know Your Customer. Every bank must follow anti-money laundering (AML) laws and regulations to help limit the risk of being conduits to launder money or fund terrorism.

Remove the bank intermediary, however, and this important process now must occur before allowing customers to use the platform.

While some banks may choose to outsource this to a third party, it is critical to remember that while a third party can perform the process, the institution still owns the risk.

There are a myriad of regulations that should be considered as the technology is designed. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union’s online privacy law, is a good example of how regulations apply differently on a blockchain.

One of the GDPR rules is the so-called right to be forgotten. Since transactions are immutable and cannot be erased or edited, companies need to ensure that data they write to a blockchain doesn’t violate these regulatory frameworks.

Finally, while blockchains are sometimes considered “self-auditing,” that does not mean the role of an auditor disappears.

For example, revenue recorded on a blockchain can support a financial statement or balance sheet audit. While there is assurance that the number recorded has not been modified, auditors still need to understand and validate how revenue is recognized.

What’s Ahead
The use of blockchain technology has the potential to generate great disruption in the marketplace. Successful implementation will come to those who consider the risks up front while embracing the existing regulatory framework.

There has already been massive innovation, and this is only the beginning of a massive journey of change.

What’s At Stake In A Tech-Driven World

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technology-10-2-18.pngTechnology is driving a wave of disruption across the entire financial services landscape. Financial services companies are increasingly finding themselves both competing with and working alongside more agile, highly entrepreneurial technology-based entities in a new and evolving ecosystem.

There are a number of global trends creating opportunities for financial services companies:

  • China’s population is growing at about 7 percent annually, roughly the equivalent of creating a country the size of Mexico every year.
  • At the same time, China and other emerging, fast-growing economies are raising many of their people above the poverty line, creating a new class of financial services consumer.
  • In more developed countries, people are retiring later and living longer.

These trends are driving a growing need for financial services. However, the story does not end with demographics and economics. Changes in technology are reshaping the ways these services are being delivered and consumed.

Consumers expect simplicity and mobility. Smartphones provide a wide range of financial services at our fingertips. With the rapid growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, savvy financial services companies are adapting to the new ecosystem of digital service delivery and customer relationship providers. Gone are the days when customers have to visit the local bank branch to get most of the services and products they needed. The shakeup in providers will make for a vastly different landscape for competing financial services organizations in the near future.

While the adoption of blockchain technology is still in its infancy, it will potentially reshape the financial services landscape. Much of the transaction processing, matching, reconciliation and the movement of information between different parties will be a thing of the past. Once regulation has caught up, blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, will become ubiquitous.

Financial services companies need to understand where they fit in this digitally fueled, rapidly evolving environment. They need to decide how to take advantage of digital transformation. Many are starting to use robotic process automation to reduce their costs. But the reality is the spread of automation will soon level the playing field in terms of cost, and these companies will once again need to look for competitive advantage, either in the products and services they offer or the way they can leverage their relationships with customers and partners.

When companies leverage technology and data to achieve their business goals in this new environment, they also introduce new risks. Cybersecurity and data governance are two areas where financial services companies continue to struggle. The safety of an ecosystem will be dependent on its weakest link. For instance, if unauthorized breaches occur in one entrepreneurial technology company with less mature controls, those breaches can put all connected institutions and their customer information at risk. Further, automation can result in decisions based solely on data and algorithms. Without solid data governance, and basic change controls, mistakes can rapidly propagate and spiral before they can be detected, with dramatic consequences for customer trust, regulatory penalty and shareholder value.

Strategically, financial services companies will need to decide if they want to be curators of services from various providers—and focus on developing strong customer relationships—or if they want to provide the best product curated and offered by others. Investing in one of these strategies will be a key to success.

Balancing Innovation and Risk Through Disciplined Disruption

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The digital disruption reshaping financial services mirrors the disruption brought about by Netflix, Uber, Lyft and Amazon in other sectors of the economy. What distinguishes financial technology companies is the financial and personal information their consumers entrust them with. The savviest fintech companies are those that employ discipline and structure to manage risk.

Many fintech companies adopt a fast-failure approach: move quickly and accept mistakes as necessary for innovation. Coordinating innovation with risk management might seem cumbersome. But if innovation is not integrated with effective risk management, companies risk running afoul of regulatory or compliance responsibilities.

One challenge fintech companies face is the sheer number of regulators that have rulemaking or supervisory authority over them due to unique business models and state level licensing and regulators. In the absence of a uniform regulatory scheme, there is widespread confusion about rules, expectations, oversight and regulatory risk. Many fintech companies and their banking partners remain uncertain about which laws and regulations apply or, most importantly, how they will be supervised against those rules.

A potential solution to this problem was the announcement in December 2016 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that it intended to create a special purpose national bank charter for fintech companies. The OCC aims to promote safety and soundness in the banking system while still encouraging innovation. A special purpose national bank charter would create a straightforward supervisory structure, coordinated by one primary regulator. This has turned out to be a controversial proposal, since the Conference of State Bank Supervisors has sued the OCC in federal court claiming that creation of a fintech charter would be a violation of the agency’s chartering authority.

Common Weaknesses
Executing an effective risk management plan in an innovative culture is challenging. Companies should be alert to the following common areas of weakness that can create vulnerability.

Compliance culture: Fintech companies often have more in common with technology startups than with financial services companies, which becomes particularly notable when maintaining a compliance management system (CMS). Compared with banking peers, many fintech firms generally have less mature compliance cultures that can struggle under increased regulatory scrutiny. The lack of a comprehensive CMS exposes companies to considerable risk, particularly as regulators apply bank-like expectations to fintech companies.

Risk assessments: Many companies fail to move beyond the assessment of inherent risk to the next logical steps: identifying and closing gaps in the control structure. Assessing the control environment and continually aligning an organization’s resources, infrastructure and technology to pockets of unmitigated risk is critical.

Monitoring and testing: Fintech companies can fail to distinguish between monitoring and testing, or understand why both are important. When executed properly, the two processes provide assurance of sound and compliant risk strategy.

Complaint management: Many organizations become mired in addressing individual complaints instead of the deeper issues the complaints reveal. Root cause analysis can help companies understand what is driving the complaints and, if possible, how to mitigate similar complaints through systemic change.

Corrective action: Finally, because of their fast-fail approach, fintech companies do not always follow up to remediate problems. Companies need feedback loops and appropriate accountability structures that allow them to track, monitor and test any issues after corrective action has taken place.

Strategies Across the Organization
Fintech companies should define clear and sustainable governance and risk management practices and integrate them into decision-making and operational activities across the organization. There are a number of actions that can help companies establish or evaluate their risk management strategies.

Assess risks: Because the fast-failure approach can ignite risk issues across the board, companies should evaluate their structure and sustainability of controls, the environment in which they operate, and their leadership team’s discipline level to measure the coordination of risk management and operational progress.

Identify gaps: Often, these gaps (for example non-compliance with certain laws and regulations, ineffective controls or a poor risk culture) represent the gulf between risks and the risk tolerance of the organization. A company’s risk appetite should drive the design of its risk management strategy and execution plan.

Design a road map: Whether a certain risk should be managed through prevention or mitigation will be driven by the potential impact of the risk and the available resources. Defining a plan within these constraints is important in explaining the risk management journey to key stakeholders.

Execute the plan: Finally, companies should deploy the resources necessary to execute the plan. Appropriate governance, including clear lines of accountability, is paramount to disciplined execution.

Successful companies align their core business strategies with effective risk management and efficient compliance. This alignment is especially important in the constantly changing fintech environment. Risk management and innovation can and should coexist. When they do, success is just around the corner.

John Epperson, principal with Crowe Horwath LLP, is theco-author of this piece.

How Will Fintech Innovation Scale?

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There is a lively debate in the fintech ecosystem about which firms will be able to scale fintech innovation and how they will do that. Will fintechs scale through organic growth and acquisitions or will they partner with more established providers? Three models are currently being discussed when pundits and the companies themselves attempt to predict how this will take place.

The Go It Alone Model
Those who think that fintech companies should go it alone believe that companies themselves will rise and beat incumbents by providing superior digital experiences and highly intuitive products to their customers. Supporters of this model point to three significant supporting facts. Disruption has happened in every other sector. Just as Amazon and Uber have changed the landscape when it comes to books and ground transportation, companies that grow quickly and join PayPal and Intuit will offer financial services beyond those provided by traditional banks.

These go it alone supporters point out that unlike most banks, fintechs are not built on top of clumsy legacy systems and therefore can offer cheaper and faster products. Those who believe that fintechs can grow organically see banks as being too slow to provide the innovation that consumers want and too stubborn to pay the appropriate multiples to buy fintechs that have a proven record of success. Unfortunately, there is a small but growing list of investors that refuse to back fintech startups that plan to distribute through banks. Early forays into distribution through banks have been sufficiently difficult to repel some investors.

Many in the ecosystem think the go it alone supporters are missing key points. They argue that the cost of customer acquisition is very high for these independent fintech companies. Getting to 80,000 users seems doable, but getting to 250,000 will be extremely difficult for most fintechs, in part because the cost of funding is much higher without bank deposits. Most fintechs rely on the capital markets and other institutional sources of money, including private equity investors, for their funding. Go it alone skeptics also believe that regulators will eventually demand expensive and complex compliance from fintechs that will increase their costs while decreasing their nimbleness. They are concerned that many of these companies are growing by subsidizing the cost of their products, and also lack business models that would make them independently profitable.

Financial Service Incumbents as Innovation Partners Model
A significant number of thought leaders believe incumbent financial services players such as banks and insurance companies will build platforms for best-in-class fintech partnerships. They believe this will be necessary because customers, having seen and heard the promise of new innovation, will demand better products. Supporters of this point of view emphasize that banks do not have the high customer acquisition costs of fintechs, are already familiar with regulatory expectations and have a much lower cost of funds. They argue that such competitive advantages will give them time to partner with or acquire any innovations that they will need. There may come a time when financial service incumbents build their own fintech products. However, at least in the near term, the sheer number of potential innovation needs—ranging from from machine learning tools and data analytics to natural language voice interface–will mean they will need to partner in order to keep up.

Skeptics of this model believe banks make bad partners when partnering with fintechs seeking scale. They insist banks are slow and generally do not do a good job of selling their customers on products they do not own or control. There are also concerns about the cost of partnering with banks. Some fintechs see integration with legacy solutions as a long and clumsy process and believe that meeting vendor risk management standards and other bank regulatory mandates as unnecessarily expensive and time consuming.

The Other Incumbents Model
Another relatively new view is that fintech innovation will scale through other incumbents. This approach often arises as an alternative in conversations concerning the flaws inherent in the other two models. Three types of incumbents are mentioned:

  • Retail: Proponents suggest that retailers or wholesalers will enter the financial services arena by partnering with fintechs and using a bank as a utility. These outlets have existing customer bases and some already offer various forms of financing. For specific niches it is easy to see the connection. If Home Depot offered financial tools to manage a contractor’s business, it would help their core business.
  • Employers and Payroll Providers: One of the most successful savings programs of all time is employer sponsored 401(k) plans. Recent talk of rolling in student debt payoff plans and financial health programs through employers have some fintechs wondering if they can scale through employers. Earned wage management tools are advancing earned money to employees outside of a normal pay cycle to help employees avoid payday lenders. Saving tools for goals other than retirement could be offered by employers.
  • Telecoms: Telecom providers are functioning as financial service providers in developing countries where there is limited financial infrastructure. Supporters argue that many fintechs are mobile-first technologies and data suggests that mobile is the preferred banking channel for a significant–and growing–percentage of consumers.

Most of the other incumbent models recognize that there has to be a bank involved but relegates its role to one of a utility. This position tends to spark another round of debate. Will banks become utilities if they don’t learn to be better partners?

Common to all of these conversations is the growing expectation that innovation will alter how we interact with financial service providers. Whether the provider is a bank, fintech or employer, all agree that consumers and businesses expect innovative solutions and that the best solutions will scale or be widely imitated. No matter how these innovations scale, there is little doubt that significant change is coming and much of the innovation will be driven by technology.