What I Wish You knew is an ongoing blog series about jobs, career and work choices. If you'd like to participate, contact me! Today I am thrilled to welcome a professional who specializes in fraud protection.
My official title is fraud supervisor in our bank protection department. I have a team of seven who complete reviews of various processes to ensure we minimize regulatory, process and customer risk. I also supervise individuals who work with corporate escalations and debit bureau disputes. My job is to ensure reviews are completed on time, and to accurately and correctly identify opportunities to better support our groups.
A large amount of my time is spent in meetings trying to simplify processes as well as creating new processes to better identify potential risks.
I am new to my role, and new to this bank—two months. I chose it for many reasons. Previously, I was a fraud operations manager for a credit card bank, which I really liked. I was about two years in my position, and watched the job change from fraud detection to customer service, helping people unlock their credit accounts.
When I decided it was time to think about continuing down my career path, I kept my eyes open beyond my organization to gain new knowledge, so someday I may be able to go back and not only get the job I had originally wanted there, but also to have a higher compensation package than internally promoted individuals.
Happiness in Finding Opportunities
Happiness in a role where you can be perceived as the bad guy because your team is pointing out opportunities is hard to come by. I have learned in my very short time in this role that happiness comes from my team’s successes, and from being able to move forward as a team to successfully partner with process owners to create and implement changes.
Being terrible at Excel, my most recent feeling of happiness has come from finally understanding how to manipulate data to create pivot tables and present the data to supervisors way above my level.
Changing the Way It’s Always Been Done
The biggest challenge of my current career is trying to influence people who have done something the same way for many years. I want them to see there could be a better way or more important things to consider. It is hard not to give up some days. There is a lot of ‘we do it because it has always been’ mentality. I anticipated some of this because I knew others who worked here before I arrived, but I did not understand the extent, which makes it difficult.
I have a boss who wants everything phrased a certain way, so I cannot say things the way I think they need to be expressed. There is not much of a technology boost, so all my team’s tasks are completed through Excel, which has the opportunity for many errors. If I had stayed in my previous role, I could have been stuck taking escalated calls, working with entry level individuals who did not care about their job, and had supervisors who were more concerned about who drank with who after work than helping you reach your goals. Sometimes you have to take a risk. I hope that when I reach six months here, I am happy I took the risk.
A Day in the Life
I wake up at 5 AM and leave my house by 6 to get to work by 7ish. Immediately, I look through emails, team timecards and the long list of notes from the previous day. My team starts rolling in around 7:30, and I make every effort to get out of my office to welcome them and ask them if I can help with anything. I generally am in meetings for at least six hours a day, which from what I have observed, are meetings about meetings. In between, I am scrambling to meet deadlines for audit issues that were discovered before I came on board.
I have my team come in periodically to my office for help and advice on how to look at something on a review, how to get a manager to respond or how to move forward with a project coming due. As I see it, it doesn’t matter what is on my plate. I am here to support my team, and everything stops for them, an attitude I wish more managers would adopt. I try to leave by 4 most days, but usually someone likes to schedule a meeting from 4 to 5. I leave and get home around 6:15.
What I Wish You Knew
Money isn’t worth everything. Also, if you’re not raising eyebrows, you’re not doing your job.
The bank currently farms its credit card service to a third party, but I would like to bring it back in house. I would love to go back to supporting card fraud rather than deposit fraud if I remain here. I hope that fraud supervisors learn to teach their customer-facing analysts compassion and empathy, so when a person falls for a scam or has an accident, they do not have their account closed and reported as a fraud suspect and have difficulties opening bank accounts for the next five years.
I believe in education and second chances. There are many more good people than fraudsters; it is important to teach our customers to protect their identity and assets, and if something were to happen, how to react and begin to work through the problem.