Pepper Money has implemented a new fraud detection platform, Fortiro Protect, designed to support the lender in identifying fraudulent financial documents submitted by loan applicants.

The Fortiro-developed platform, which complements existing KYC and customer fraud analysis technologies, automates fraud checks of customer documents, including payslips and bank statements.

The technology analyses document layouts, content and metadata discrepancies that, Fortiro says, typically cannot be identified by human eye.

Once analysed, the software applies a configurable fraud risk score to each document; high-risk samples are flagged and sent to risk teams for further investigation.

Fortiro boasts that its Protect software completes more than 80 fraud checks within 30 seconds.

Commenting on the lender’s new anti-fraud deployment, Andrew Gamble, Pepper Money’s head of sales (asset finance), said: “There’s a heightened amount of fraud in the market. We identified that we can’t just stand still on fraud. While we had some good controls around high-risk rules, using biometrics and E-Sign [electronic signatures], there was more that we needed to do.”

“Analysing income documents, such as payslips, was something we thought was a great opportunity for us to identify if there was fraud coming through the business.”

Gamble said the Fortiro solution provided an ideal complement to Pepper Money’s existing fraud protection methods, including biometric checks of customers.

“Fraud is a massive industry problem. It’s something that all lenders must address. We are proud to be working with Fortiro to use technology to reduce fraud.”

Pepper has also on-boarded Fortiro’s document redaction solution Fortiro Redact, which automatically censors, or blacks-out, sensitive customer data within documents – a regulatory requirement to protect PII data from unsolicited exposure.

Prior to implementation of Redact, Gamble said, “[exposed] documents had to be manually redacted, re-saved and uploaded back with the application.

“It was a very slow and cumbersome process. Now we send those documents through Fortiro Redact. The documents are redacted automatically and sent back to us efficiently via an API”.

Pepper has also integrated Fortiro’s Accelerate solution, designed to verify applicants’ income and expense submissions.

The tool automatically extracts, aggregates and analyses income data from documents, such as payslips or bank, statements and inputs them directly into their loan origination system.

Applicant names, income types and employment types are then matched to the supporting document, while high-risk spending patterns and expenses are broken down by category, location and type.

Combined with automated fraud checks, income verification and automated redaction, Fortiro said the lender, which provides a range of personal, commercial, car and home loans, aims to slash approvals down to “within a few minutes”.

Gamble added that the company’s goal is to full loan application, ‘time to yes’ and receipt of funds experience to within an hour.

“We are managing risk, and the customer is getting their money rapidly. That’s a huge result,” he said.