Fast-Paced Fraud Prevention
Working for a high-growth fin-tech offers a unique set of opportunities when it comes to managing fraud. The Marshmallow fraud team are always Moving Fast to match the pace of the company’s expansion and continue to grow our prevention capabilities.
Here’s a few things we do that help us stay ahead of the game.
Utilise the old and the new
Your views on the best methods for preventing and detecting insurance fraud will most likely depend on your professional background. At Marshmallow, we draw on strategies and insight from across the board. It’s the combining of these strategies that we believe has helped us optimise our processes. It’s both the old and the new that’s allowed us to create an effective and efficient fraud prevention and detection function.
We’ve developed a suite of supervised learning models, for example, all of them updating and adapting constantly to combat any emerging fraud trends. Never is the Move Fast maxim that Marshmallow lives by more apt than when tackling fraud and financial crime. The further we progress our technology, the more we discover new possibilities, and the quicker we learn how to implement changes.
But we also know that rules and strategy-writing still have their place, so we attempt to synergise the two. It’s easy to be drawn to the shiny new ML model overlooking tried and tested techniques, but what does this leave behind? The reality is that rules and strategies can respond much faster to the changing landscape than a model can — and to forget them is to miss a trick!
Breakthroughs happen on the shoulders of older methods.
Combine a variety of skill-sets
These synergies don’t just apply to our tools and processes, though. Our team have a diverse range of professional backgrounds, from fin-tech to e-commerce and banking to the police (the crime detection service, we don’t work with Sting, unfortunately)
The variety in our experience means that as one team, we’re harnessing a lot of unique skill-sets and that’s a pretty good starting-point for coming up with new solutions. The broader our collective experience, the wider our understanding is of what can be done to move forward. There is no shortcut for experience, so we firmly believe that the best, most sustainable way to grow the team is to bring together a variety of different perspectives.
We’re always on the look-out for new ideas and inspiration. We know that learning new skills is what leads to progress, so that’s exactly what we want to bring to Marshmallow.
Embrace the Known Unknowns
Anyone in this industry knows that the job is never done. As a team we embrace the fact that there’s a whole lot of stuff that we just don’t know yet and — borrowing from Donald Rumsfeld’s phrasing — it’s the known unknown that drives experimentation, analysis and enquiry in any sector. We know that this is what leads to breakthroughs and innovation.
It’s not good enough to persist with something just because it’s the way it’s always been done.
Embracing the fact that there is a lot we have to learn makes this transition smoother. We try to separate ideas from their creators and look at things from first principles. This way, we’re able to stay on top of what we don’t know, and it gives us a good chance of spotting where we’re falling short.
Going forward, we need to continue to learn and grow at the pace that the business does, drawing on the collective adaptability that’s got Marshmallow to where we are today.
