The 3 actual reasons why working in fraud management today can be stressful

Fraud analysts have become key resources in every organization, especially in the financial world, where protecting users from losing their money and their data is extremely important. 

Experienced and skilled fraud experts are a rare resource in the cybersecurity market, thus retaining them in the company and ensuring they have all they need to work at their best is key.

After many years working in fraud management, we have witnessed how, under the wrong conditions, being a fraud analyst can become highly stressful and frustrating. We have also seen the great reward and satisfaction it can give when catching a fraud attempt before it hits millions of users. 

Above all, we have learned how important it is to preserve analysts’ mental health with the right tools and processes in place. 

In this article, we list the three reasons why working in fraud management can be stressful, and we provide some advice on how to improve the working life to retain talents and keep fighting against online fraud.

Working in fraud management has always been a delicate and stressful job, but today it appears to be more challenging than ever. 

Luckily, the development of advanced AI-based fraud management systems has helped ease fraud analysts’ jobs by taking off their plates some time-consuming tasks and reducing the effort on others. 

However, technology cannot replace fraud analysts. Fighting fraud efficiently is possible only through a combination of skills, processes, and anti-fraud solutions, tailored to the specific situation and needs of the organization.

Today, fraud analysts need to face three major changes that lead to increased stress in their daily job:

1. The development of advanced attacks that are more difficult to detect and stop;
2. The increase of online banking services and digital channels to monitor;
3. Higher users' expectations in terms of usability and digital experience.

Banks and financial institutions need to ensure maximum safety and the best user experience for their customers, turning fraud management into a core activity for the business. 

For this reason, managing stress is essential to avoid burnout and the risk of losing key human resources in your company. 

The most frequent reason why fraud analysts get easily stressed is the large number of open cases to manage.

In fraud management, open cases could be either anomalies found in the system or successful attacks that need further investigation as it is difficult to understand how they occurred.

Most of today’s fraud management processes rely on vertical solutions that monitor only a limited part of the story and depend heavily on the concept of risk score. Relying only on that number leads to imprecise and inefficient decisions, either letting fraudsters in or blocking genuine customers too often as it could produce "false positives" (see Myth #5 in our "7 myths about fighting online banking fraud to leave behind in 2022" article). 

False positives are all genuine sessions that are, however, considered too risky and, thus, blocked, causing a high level of friction (and frustration) for the user. 

Further investigations will be required in both cases, resulting in more open cases laying on the fraud analysts’ plate until a final decision can be taken.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, silos-based processes end up with many cases to investigate in detail to provide the best possible response to each threat. 

Each investigation requires days or weeks. It is paramount that fraud analysts are both fast and 100% accurate in their analysis to ensure the best service to their customers. Do you realize how stressful it could be?

Two main aspects cause a long investigation time:

1. Fraud analysts must look at multiple tools and dashboards to manually correlate all the information due to the lack of automated systems that can easily correlate all the data points. The result is a time-consuming task that slows down the entire investigation process. 
2. Fraud analysts lack the information to investigate each case properly. Most of the time, the analysis is focused on the transactional part and one channel at a time, missing key insights on the way. A complete picture is possible only if the whole user journey is monitored, starting from even before the authentication phase and correlating what’s going on across different channels.

Now more than ever, fraud evolve fast, and for this reason, it is paramount for fraud analysts to constantly keep track of what’s happening in the cyber world. 

Monitoring fraudsters' move is not an easy task if we think about it. It requires always staying ahead and making sure to quickly predict what they are going to do in the near future.

Having a Tailored Threat Intelligence feed that supports daily activities gives fraud analysts a big advantage in terms of efficiency and stress reduction. A Tailored Threat Intelligence team can do the heavy-lifting job by identifying and classifying all the possible threats that target your systems. In this way, fraud analysts will only have to decide how to best deal with them. 

This translates into easier and quicker processes, better work distribution, and anxiety reduction, which means more motivation and productivity in fraud management. 

In a few words, if you want to ensure your fraud analysts don’t work under a high-stress level, decreasing their performance and motivation to stay within your company, you need to guarantee them the best and most efficient working processes.

This means taking off their plate part of the tasks that could be done by an efficient fraud management solution that works fast, sees all, and connects the dots. 

This is how we see technology. A safer place where humans are constantly supported in their daily job to protect others. 

Fraud management is about processes, people, and technology. Only by ensuring these three key elements work smoothly together, you can provide the best fight against online banking fraud. 

At Cleafy, we kept all this in mind when developing our solution. A solution that combines multiple detection technologies with threat intelligence data and automates the most appropriate responses based on actual threat patterns rather than the generic risk scores. 

Thanks to this, we enable fraud management teams to do their job more efficiently and to have an optimal work-life balance.
Having more time to dedicate to private life translates into higher satisfaction at work and higher retention of talents.