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November 11, 2021

Will AI Replace Fraud Analysts?

Artificial intelligence is a great friend, at least most of the time. How about AI replacing your job? As a fraud analyst, continue to read to learn if AI can replace your job or not!

Especially the term artificial intelligence that we have come across recently is a technology that can infer from the data it collects by processing it with a certain pattern, making decisions, or making predictions accordingly. Simply, it is an attempt to transfer human thinking to a computer. Artificial intelligence, which helps us in our daily lives, is also used in many areas of business life. One of these areas is fraud detection. In this sense, there are certain questions that usually come to mind: what is artificial intelligence? What are the uses of artificial intelligence? Will artificial intelligence replace humans in the future? And what are the impacts on fraud detection and fraud analysts by detecting fraud?

Will AI Replace Humans?

Although artificial intelligence may be frightening and contentious to many people, there are many areas where it helps people. It provides supports and conveniences in many fields such as translating languages, diagnosing diseases, navigation, cyber security, and customer satisfaction tools for the customer services in companies and detecting fraud.

How does artificial intelligence disburden people's workload?

Especially in this period when data emerges in a huge amount and in a very fast flow, artificial intelligence helps to solve many problems or make many jobs easier. Some of them are mentioned below:

AI helps people increase creativity and optimize production processes. Some criteria of a product such as the cost, size, and shape of it, can be given to artificial intelligence as data and it optimizes the production of the product according to these criteria. That makes production easier. It can offer new product ideas, thus making it easier for people to focus on the design of the product. Also in terms of production, artificial intelligence can complete certain tasks that are challanging and dangerous for workers.

It facilitates communication within the company and between the company and customers. It can convert meetings, voice messages and notifications into writing. It can communicate virtually with customers about a problem they are experiencing or about their satisfaction as a digital assistant. Thus, can draw conclusions by analyzing these conversations, and solutions to problems can be found. Furthermore, sales strategies can be created by using historical consumption data.

Thanks to this technology, we can use advanced systems in areas such as deriving information of visual data, creating routes of self-driving cars, diagnosis of diseases, and sharing images on social media.

Human Jobs that AI Can Replace:

According to the studies of some institutions or individuals on artificial intelligence, it is predicted that some jobs will be carried out by artificial intelligence in the future. It is predicted that the tasks of accountants, customer service executives, doctors, proofreaders, data entry and bookkeeping, retail services, market research analysts, courier services, soldiers, security guards, taxi or bus drivers… will be done by artificial intelligence. It works automatically with established algorithms and systems so can offer safer and optimal solutions.  

Human Jobs that AI Can’t Replace:

As we mentioned, artificial intelligence can do or facilitate many tasks by itself. However, it's not possible to completely replace people, especially in some jobs that require human intervention. Controlling or carrying out the work done in some jobs by humans plays an important role in obtaining correct and optimal results. To name a few of these people whose jobs are considered irreplaceable by AI according to some studies, we can say chiefs, communicators, marketers and designers, human resources specialists, data scientists, cyber security experts, etc.  

 

Artificial Intelligence in Fraud Analysis

With the development of technology, a large part of our lives has become digital. Now we carry out many activities in our lives through digital channels. Especially, the big majority of purchases and money transfers take place online. At this point, issues such as fraud, fraud detection, and prevention gain great importance for companies as well as customers. Fraud analysts use artificial intelligence to detect these frauds within the company.

AI use cases in financial services industry worldwide as of 2020
AI use cases in the financial services industry worldwide as of 2020

Source: Statista

Difficulties in Detecting Fraud:

When detecting fraud, it becomes difficult to find the transaction that is suspected of fraud among these data, since there are too much data in the system. This data needs to be organized and classified with some rules. Often problems may arise with these classifications and in some cases, this may also result in loss of customers due to false signals (false-positive). Because of this false signal, time can be lost analyzing other transactions and detecting fraud. It may also take a long time to determine the features and criteria for this classification.  

Fraudsters are constantly finding new ways to pass systems. To prevent this, there is a need for an up-to-date control mechanism that constantly monitors them.  

The Solutions of AI to These Difficulties:

Artificial intelligence works with certain rules and models. Thanks to the systems created with these rules and models, it has the ability to analyze a very large number of transaction data in a little time. So it can detect fraud faster and take quick actions.  

The processing of data and the operation of systems with human control means cost, time, and risk of wrong analysis for the company. Working with automated systems reduces the time and effort spent on fraud detection. So, less labour force is needed in fraud detection.

It also enables the quick detection of false-positive cases with the filters and algorithms in the system. Thanks to artificial intelligence, analysts do not have to spend a lot of time on these false positives.

Fraud analysts are warned about the issues that they want about abnormal behaviors thanks to filters in artificial intelligence. In this way, it processes more data and can classify operations that people have difficulty in classifying and fitting into patterns.

The Importance of Fraud Analysts in These Issues:

Although artificial intelligence can handle many tasks with algorithms and installed software, they need to be trained for changing conditions or for evolving methods. If the rules used by artificial intelligence are too much, this can still lead to false positives. Since the methods used by fraudsters are constantly changing in the field of fraud, artificial intelligence must be trained by entering new and different classification criteria and rules into artificial intelligence systems. The people who do these are fraud analysts.  

False-positive cases that occur in fraud detection need to be investigated. At this point, people need some insight, detailed research and reporting. Fraud analysts will ensure this.  

The Effective Results and Benefits of Fraud Analysts Working With The Support of Artificial Intelligence

While artificial intelligence can quickly handle data collection and analysis, fraud analysts can turn their attention to critical tasks that requires human intervention.

Artificial intelligence takes care of some of the manual and time-consuming work in fraud detection. Fraud analysts organize the filtering and classification of elements to be arranged for the systems and algorithms of artificial intelligence, training the artificial intelligence against fraudulent methods that change and develop over time to ensure optimal results. While artificial intelligence is making these fraud detections, analysts concentrate on strategic work and can easily deal with when a problem occurs in the system or when a false-positive case occurs. According to the results obtained from artificial intelligence, analysts can use insight and report more easily. Using artificial intelligence as analysts' assistants in fraud detection means both time and cost savings and a reduction in stress. In summary, instead of having only artificial intelligence or only analysts working in fraud detection, enabling artificial intelligence and analysts to work together will bring much more benefit to companies and will provide optimal results in the analysis.