iTWire - The SAS executive whose mission is to help companies combat fraud befor...

SAS senior vice president fraud and security intelligence Stu Bradley spent time in Australia during April re-kindling relationships with Australian customers as the world returns to normal following COVID travel restrictions, and took time from his busy schedule to speak with iTWire.

iTWire previously spoke with Bradley during international fraud awareness week in 2018. Bradley heads the fraud and security division, which was established in April of that year. Five years on, the division is making significant gains in helping organisations deal with the alarming rise in scams that have come about since the beginning of the pandemic.

"The technology landscape has accelerated so greatly since my last visit to Australia in 2019,” Bradley said, “and so has the overall fraud landscape also changed so greatly since that time.”

"The global pandemic was a very trying time and still is from a personal, health, and medical perspective,” Bradley said. “And also a very trying time for the onslaught of fraud.”

The combination of technology advancements in general, along with the opportunities to commit fraud that came through the pandemic created many challenges for business, he explained.

For example, Governments around the world rapidly devised schemes to distribute relief funds, and bad actors around the world duly sought to take advantage of these programs. “It created a perfect storm through the pandemic,” Bradley said.

In fact, these Government programs were “rife with fraud, identity theft, and fraudulent claims,” he said. “Governments are still trying to understand the impact fraud had on their programs,” with some Governments avoiding the conversation entirely because fraud was so pervasive in their programs.

Ultimately, "Government money was easy money so the fraudsters went to where the easy money was.” However, Bradley notes now these programs have come to an end Governments and businesses are seeing a resurgence of fraud across other industries as the fraudsters go back to their original bread and butter.

Of course, we could talk about the reality and pervasiveness of frauds endlessly. The big questions SAS aims to answer are what are we doing about it? And how do we prevent it?

In short, it comes down to data.

"We're taking an approach to ensure financial organisations, governments, and others are thinking about the ecosystem of information they have available so they can have a sustainable program that is agile and able to address not only the scams we have today but the ones they will experience tomorrow,” Bradley said.

That sounds like a simple statement on the first appearance, but Bradley’s words are loaded with ramifications.

For one, just as business leaders are encouraged to make data-driven decisions to help advance company strategy, so too it’s imperative data be employed in fraud prevention and fraud preparation.

In fact, Bradley says, by bringing the data together “not only can you do a better job of identifying where there is fraud risk, but you can identify the bulk majority of transactions with no fraud risk and make a better process.” By making a fabric like this, you inherently give yourself the ability to automate this process.

However, secondly, it's imperative to be future-focused. During our conversation, Bradley often refers to constructing flexible and agile data ecosystems.

Sometimes, he explains, organisations make the mistake of trying to address too specific an issue, that solves a specific problem, but leaves holes in the fraud detection program that can be exploited by bad actors.

"Too often organisations get confronted with an issue, whether compliance or fraud and solve that specific issue because it’s urgent and painful,” he says. “But it’s not solved in a way that helps them create a sustainable and agile platform to confront the next problem they will be hit with.”

In short, solve issues too tactically and you end up with a patchwork quilt of non-sustainable things.

Thus, Bradley says, “you must solve the tactical issues with a view that aligns them to long-term strategic intent.”

This isn't new; "it was the same problem in 2018, it’s the same problem today,” he says. “The problem hasn’t necessarily changed, but what has changed is the wider adoption of cloud-based architectures and delivery models so organisations like SAS who are now cloud-native can deliver in a much more rapid sequence and with enhanced capabilities that they can serve to all.”

SAS is an analytical platform, of course; the company was founded in 1976 by Dr Jim Goodnight and other faculty members of North Carolina State University where Goodnight was originally an academic. Originally, SAS began as a research project to create a general-purpose statistical analytics system (hence the name SAS) for analysing agricultural data. The software gained 100 customers and the company SAS was born. Today, the company counts its revenue in billions and has customers in all industries and of all sizes, all around the world.

At its most simple description, SAS manages and mines data from a variety of sources and performs statistical analysis on it. With today’s cloud power, SAS can rapidly analyse vast volumes of data and can construct advanced machine learning models.

Whether the problem is fraud, or whether the problem is better mental health outcomes for frontline workers, identifying deforestation risks, or automating farming equipment to spray only weeds it all comes down to data, and to the appropriate use of that data.

One question this writer had for Stu Bradley was whether his fraud and security intelligence division has its own series of vertical industry-specific tools built on top of the core SAS product, or if it was all the same SAS out-of-the-box that worked for each of these data use cases.

“SAS offers an analytical platform with a series of analytic tools,” Bradley explains. “Every solution we build is built on that analytic platform, and the importance of that is when you take on a fraud or risk or marketing or compliance solution is a common architecture for the customer.”

On top of this common architecture, “SAS has acquired a terrific amount of domain expertise,” he says. “Those domain experts deliver very specific out-of-the-box capabilities to ensure we are addressing business problems like fraud detection, and the others in a consistent way through the solution.”

Thus, the SAS secret sauce is no matter your industry, SAS brings its expertise to apply statistical analytics to your data via a consistent set of tools that acquire, manage, and analyse your data and bring solid solutions relevant to your domain.

Ultimately, Bradley says, it’s all about “how do organisations better leverage the information at their fingertips to make decisions, and to bring data in at the right point of time for the customer journey?”

And then, "leveraging information through the digital journey at all points to make ongoing decisions such that you make a better job of preventing fraud but ensuring legitimate actions don’t have barriers.”

This puts you and your business in the best position to deal with what’s coming next. “How do I look over the horizon and see what new events I haven’t seen before, and better respond to them when they occur?” Bradley asks. The answer comes down to data, and appropriately and responsibly using that data in a flexible and agile way that solves not only your concerns of today but puts you in the best position to face the problems of tomorrow.

This is where SAS and its experts come in, and it’s the approach Stu Bradley is taking. And this approach comes not from cutting corners or seeking shortcuts, but based on experience and a personal mission to help organisations and businesses stop crime before it happens.