BFA #019 | Becoming a Subject Matter Expert

What's happening Fraud Fighters?

Not sure what happened last week…

I was out on a much deserved break and thought I had everything scheduled properly. LinkedIn worked just fine. Not entirely sure what happened, but here we are. How about we just pretend nothing happened and we just move forward? Cool?

I received one question privately this week that caught me off guard and made me really have to think how I answered it. Why not let you all in on what I was thinking

Let's investigate further.

Read Time: ~3.57 Minutes

Tales of an Operational Fraud Leader

I am an operational Fraud Leader and proud to be so.

How operational I am though depends on the business priorities and on my capacity. But I will never stop being somewhat operational.

Throughout my career, I still find myself in the queues from time to time. It helps me keep my investigating skills sharp, but more importantly understand what’s really happening as a front-line fraud fighter and how they’re really impacting the business.

What have I learned getting so close to the detail? I have come away with 10x more ideas for things we can start trying and do better. Sometimes it’s the unglamorous work that has the biggest impact.

If you needed more than that to convince you to roll up your sleeves, here are a few more reasons:

Hands-On Experience - Continuously engaging in frontline tasks allows the leader to keep their skills sharp and stay up-to-date with the latest fraud trends, techniques, and prevention tools. This allows them to make more informed decisions and provide better guidance to their team.

Leadership by Example - By participating in frontline investigations, you set a positive example for your team. It sends the message that every role and task is vital, regardless of one's position in the organization.

Understanding Front-Line Challenges - Staying involved with frontline investigations gives the leader a first-hand understanding of the challenges and obstacles that their team members face. This can result in more effective problem-solving and process improvement.

User Journey Risk - An engaged leader can spot inconsistencies, loopholes, or weaknesses in the fraud controls that might be missed otherwise. By being part of frontline investigations, you can quickly act upon these findings and strengthening the overall fraud prevention strategy.

Guardrails or Busy Work

Now we all know as fraud fighters nothing is ever as simple as this. I think it is so critical in fraud management as you can so often get distracted with other tasks and ‘busy work.’ But if it doesn’t align with your north star (or key metrics) then you really need to scrutinize why you are doing them.

Fraud, arguably more than any other department, needs strict guardrails on how it supports the rest of the company. These guardrails are also important to how fraud fighters prioritize their work.

You can easily spend 100% of your time on busy work that doesn’t move the needle.

I’m sure you are no stranger to joining a company where it was 100% busy work and queue work. Ultimately this led to unpredictable and limited revenue contributions and effectiveness.

In order to create real impact and change, you need to show leadership a roadmap for hitting business objectives and get this signed off upfront.

This then becomes your key tool for pushing back on tasks that don’t impact directly on your end goal.

You should still leave yourself and your team with unplanned capacity because after all we do work in fraud. This can be used for unplanned but critical tasks and fires that need to be put out.

One Question That Made Me Think

So, how do you do it? How do you talk so openly to a crowd?

I had to stop for a second.

How do I actually do it - especially when I don’t always feel at ease even though it may seem like I can talk so openly to a crowd.

I’ve built the trust internally, but how do you make the shift to winning over a public audience?

You may have noticed that I’ve begun creating different types of content with most of my content on LinkedIn. I realized there was added benefit of turning myself from an private subject matter expert to a public subject matter expert for our fraud fighting community. I could repurpose a lot of the conversations I was having on the daily.

That’s advice I’d give anyone in my position, don’t be afraid to use the content more than once. I often change up the same content but write in different formats or from different perspectives to keep it fresh.

I was already speaking as the subject matter expert internally and with customers from my role at Dodgeball. It’s a key part of our strategy, and I consider it a cheat code for vendors who hire fraud fighters who have done the job before.

So because I can repurpose my conversations and teachings, it’s not much more effort to start writing my posts. It actually made posting easier as I had a springboard of ideas. No longer was a blank page a problem for me. The first time I tried to write a post I feel like I stared at LinkedIn’s question ‘What do you want to talk about?’ for days before I started typing anything.

I could pick parts of my conversations I had previously had that had interest and build on it.

There are 4 things that I remind myself as I continue to develop my own voice as a public subject matter expert

• What’s my why?

• Be consistent

• Be genuinely me

• Be ok learning in public

I treat LinkedIn like a conference, but instead of submitting a proposal, crossing my finders, and hoping I get selected.

I grab the mic and start talking.

What’s New This Week?

This week’s Bad Fraud Advice was inspired by a few questions I privately received this past week, so I want to try something new moving forward.

Let's tackle the biggest questions from the fraud community. Every question comes from an anonymous source. These are the questions fraud fighters have, but are afraid to ask.

Submit your anonymous question here

Recently, I jumped on the mic with Jordan from The Fraud Boxer Podcast to talk all things fraud. We covered a lot. All sorts of things from finding a fraud job, picking fraud tools, fraud orchestration, building a fraud team, managing fraud fighters, even building fraud strategy.

Listen to the Fraud Boxer Podcast here or on any major streaming platform of your preference.

I also recorded a video series with IPQualityScore (IPQS) and they have been slowly releasing the clips across LinkedIn. They’ll be releasing the full video soon, and I will share it with you all when I get it. Check out this clip on Optimizing Checkpoints & Empowering Fraud Teams for Accurate Investigations.

See you again next Friday in your inbox.

​Brian