Accelerating Anti-Fraud Innovation with Vince Walden and Matt Galvin

As the fraud risk landscape changes, how do you adapt? Today, we have Vince Walden and Matt Galvin. Vince is a Partner with Ernst & Young’s Forensic and Integrity Services Practice, and Matt is the Global Vice President of Ethics & Compliance at Anheuser-Busch InBev. We’re talking about an article Vince has co-authored in Fraud Magazine entitled: Accelerating Anti-Fraud Innovation, as well as innovations that Matt has put forward in his compliance program.

What are some of the key reasons for the success of an innovation project in the anti-fraud arena?

It’s about measuring compliance effectiveness and finding ways to keep compliance fun, interactive, and top of mind for employees. Putting systems in place so you can see measurable improvements in the quality of transactional data moving through a system is what’s driving a lot of the innovation in compliance. People are beginning to really understand the technologies available to them.

What are some of the key reasons for the failure of an innovation project in either the fraud or compliance arena?

Spiffy technology alone doesn’t innovate. When a business isn’t involved and it’s not a collaborative exercise, it’s harder to get a lot of adoption. Many think of it as an IT project as opposed to a business domain project, and expect the IT people to come up with the business questions and interpret the results. The compliance function itself is a risk function, and risk functions don’t necessarily lead themselves to innovation. It’s hard to marry the mindset of trial and error and root cause analysis to innovate in a space where you’re always thinking about the risk.

How can natural language learning help with improving the quality of data?

Nobody is going to input perfect data, because data entry, by definition, is boring. Natural language processing will have the ability to take and aggregate data that is unstructured, instead of humans having to force structure onto the data. Technology catching up with the imperfections of humanity will accelerate the pace of change.

What is the innovation funnel?

Ideate. The brainstorming phase where anything and everything can be put on the table.Evaluate. A formal committee narrows down and focuses the opportunities.Accelerate. A few projects are chosen and pilots and feasibility studies are put in place.Incubate. 2-3-week sprints are developed to quickly determine if the idea works.Iterate. Ideas are made ready to become new products and move to production systems.

The collaborative nature of innovation

If you were to take a look at compliance, what is it: systems and processes? Or can we look at it as encouraging better outcomes and business decisions? It’s the best way to drive better outcomes and decisions than to give people stronger information and make that information transparent to multiple stakeholders. That way, everyone is driving compliance.

Resources

Vince Walden | Matt Galvin | Accelerating Anti-Fraud Innovation (Fraud Magazine) | You can’t monitor what you can’t measure (Fraud Magazine) | Designing a compliance program at AB InBev (Harvard Business Review) | Why compliance programs fail — and how to fix them (Harvard Business Review)