Exiger WINs Jump Award at FCA TechSprint: Discussion & Demo

Exiger Wins at Women’s Empowerment TechSprint from Exiger on Vimeo.

Video Transcript:

Kody Gurfein | Deputy Head of Marketing and Co-Chair, ExigerWINs: Hi Everyone, I’m Kody Gurfein, Deputy Head of Marketing and Co-Chair of Exiger’s Women’s Initiative Network (Exiger WINs), Exiger’s employee resource group dedicated to attracting, retaining and promoting premier female leadership.

I’m so excited to be speaking with my colleagues Jariya Laoriendee and Nina Ryan, who were selected to participate in the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Women’s Economic Empowerment TechSprint during Women’s History Month this spring.

Jariya and Nina, thanks for joining us today and providing us a demo of the tech-enabled solutions you developed during the FCA’s TechSprint. The TechSprint was an incredible exploration of how innovation & technology can empower women’s access, inclusion & resilience and is directly aligned with Exiger’s mission of connecting expertise with technology, and through diversity of thought, build more innovative solutions that make the world a safer place to do business.

Laura Tulchin | ESG Solutions Lead and Co-Chair, Exiger WINs: Thanks, Kody! I’m Laura Tulchin, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) Solutions Lead and Co-Chair of WINs.

Jariya, your project was “Every Penny is a Seedling,” which was targeted to help vulnerable women to build financial resilience independently and discreetly. And Nina, your project was titled “What if Women Built a Bank” and won the JUMP AWARD as the “Project Most Likely to Go Straight to Prototype.”

We are so proud of the work you both did, embodying what we believe Exiger does best . . . as Kody said, leverage our technology to make the world a safer place to do business – while driving Exiger WINs’ mission to close the gender gap in technology. Both of you used data and technology to gain insight into risk and vulnerabilities in individuals’ financial health and found effects on women’s well-being. Your work is a real-life example of how Exiger’s deep expertise in banking and financial services can be combined with cutting-edge technology to create solutions to drive inclusivity and ethical financial services.

FCA TechSprint Jump Award Winner Demo: “What if Women Built a Bank?” with Nina Ryan

Kody Gurfein | Co-Chair Exiger WINs: So Nina, your product won The Jump Award by the FCA for prototype with the most potential to transform and modernize the industry. Your team was focused on “What if women built a bank?” Are banks providing solutions and appropriate financial support for women in their key life events?

We should all ask ourselves that question. Now, what really excited us was how you used Exiger’s DDIQ Analytics technology to visualize how a female-centric bank can help underserved women.

As you know Exiger was founded to fight financial crime, fraud and terrorist financing by introducing technology-enabled solutions to the market’s biggest supply chain, risk, investigation, litigation, and compliance challenges. A global authority on risk and compliance, Exiger serves the world’s Largest Banks, Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies & regulators.

At Exiger, our clients are always excited by DDIQ Analytics’ ability to automatically integrate disparate data sets across millions of data points to illuminate what matters most to them in a visualized single view. Please tell us how you applied Exiger’s technology to the FCA challenge and show us how your prototype impressed the judges enough to win the JUMP award.

Nina Ryan | Exiger Senior Consultant and winner of JUMP Award at the FCA TechSprint: Thank you, Kody. So first I’ll talk to you a bit about our Bank like a Woman prototype. We also called it “Hilda,” named after the first ever woman banker. So the platform is an intuitive financial platform that empowers women.

What it includes is an aggregation of all your accounts, whether that’s your current account, your pension, your mortgage . . . the platform also provides on-demand financial coaching, so that’s face to face with a human, not a robot, giving advice. That’s regarding the network of support services that are also included, such as Women’s Aid, Stop LoanSharks UK, Step Change and Gingerbread.

What we want to do, especially from the FCA TechSprint perspective, is provide resources for vulnerable women who perhaps are anxious, ashamed or suspicious about their finances. We assume that women have access to a bank account, they have access to a smart device and there’s no requirement for digital identity, for the first generation of this platform, so we don’t want to exclude women on the basis of not owning a possible or driver’s license to verify their identity.

We want to give women a complete picture of financial health, so as I mentioned before we want to give an aggregate view of all their accounts in one place and provide a financial health score. In the FCA TechSprint we were given some made up personas of vulnerable women and for Project Hilda we decided on two: one was a lady called Lisa. She was in a domestic abusive relationship with her partner, she only had one bank account, and that was a joint account where her income was going straight into. She shared the joint account with her abusive partner.

We also concentrated on a persona called Maria – she’s a young professional single lady who’s a recent immigrant over from the Philippines. She is sending a lot of money home each week and each month to her family and friends, and we also found out through the data that she’s in trouble with the loan shark.

Coming back to the data we were provided dummy data sets for each of the personas. And what we were able to do for this prototype was actually look at the data to be able to tell a story, and find trigger points from where Lisa and Maria might need support.

I’m just going to show you how I did that with DDIQ Analytics.

First, I took the dummy data provided by the FCA in their environment and I exported it and loaded it into Exiger’s DDIQ Analytics. What I was able to do from this is just see Maria’s average account balance by month, see were there any trends or any spikes and also where her transactions went up and down throughout the year.

DDIQ Analytics Dashboard

Then, I was able then to split out her four top spending categories, and this is what we would show Maria on the platform itself so she’s aware of exactly what her net wealth or net debt is at this point in time.

What was really interesting about Maria was her income and her payments over time that we can see on the bottom right here. What DDIQ Analytics are able to tell us is, yes, Maria is getting some loan income every month, but it actually turns out she’s paying more off than she ever received, so this is indicative of a high interest rate which ultimately would make us believe she’s in trouble with a loan shark.

So from the power of data and looking at this analysis, we were able, through the platform able to reach out to Maria and asked her if she needed help and advice from Stop Loan Sharks UK.

Moving on to Lisa we were able to do the same analysis looking at trends. What we need to remember about Lisa she’s in a coercive relationship with a joint bank account sharing with her partner.

What was really interesting from the data – which Lisa wouldn’t have known about – was there are sizable amount in November, leaving this joint bank account going to a savings account. For further investigation, we were able to pinpoint this savings account was in the name of her partner whom she shares the joint bank account.

This triggered a Red Flag which enabled our platform to get in touch with Lisa at a time that was appropriate for her and an environment that was appropriate for her to offer support and advice, through our charities and because of this trigger we ready to find out that Lisa was in fact in a coercive relationship and we offered her help and support.

So, through the power of DDIQ Analytics this is where the real value was that we were able to arrive and find these Red Flags these triggers to help women in a vulnerable situation.

Laura Tulchin | Co-Chair, Exiger WINs: So cool, Nina. Congratulations – I can see why the FCA thought this would be right to go straight to prototype.

So, if I understand correctly, you’re using the DDIQ Analytics platform to spot trends almost like a Transaction Monitoring function, but then directly involving human support mechanisms to really help vulnerable women at the right moment in their life is that right.

Nina Ryan | Exiger Senior Consultant and winner of JUMP Award at the FCA TechSprint: Yes, that’s exactly right and that’s where the power of data really lies going forwards, we all need to be able to be data savvy and spot trends, find these anomalies and through the use of DDIQ Analytics, we were able to find out how Lisa’s abusive partner was taking money out of the account and how Maria also was in trouble with a loan shark.

FCA TechSprint Demo: “Every Penny is a Seedling” with Jariya Laoriendee

Laura Tulchin | Co-Chair, Exiger WINs: Really really cool – hope to see that come to life one day, it could help a lot of women. Thank you, Nina.

So Jariya, if you could spend some time sharing your project as well and shed some light on the work that you accomplished in the FCA TechSprint, we’d love to see it.

Jariya Laoriendee | Exiger Director and FCA TechSprint Participant: Sure, I’ll share my screen and I will do the presentation that I did during the TechSprint. Our team met in the TechSprint – first day, we brainstormed and we came up with this project “Every Penny is a Seedling”.

We used the same persona as Nina team, because we know that no solution fits all. So we picked a vulnerable woman who may be in an abusive relationship, has no control over their joint account — or someone who can look after other people, but they don’t have time or money left for themselves.

And our solution – it will work for both people who get paid monthly or who get paid by cash and I will explain how it works and why.

Our team’s Problem Statement: To give vulnerable women control over their finances in a discrete account.

We came up with this account or savings product called “Sifted Saving”, which is a discrete account – it will have a hidden location in your normal mobile banking app, there will be a required secondary password and there’ll be no transaction history. It is very easy to set up and the sift is automatic to set up just once, and then it just goes with the flow.

This is how it works, you can see that our product has a sieve in the middle – when you get paid with your income / salary it will divert a small percentage you set up at the Bank to go to your discrete account and the rest will go to your normal account.

I got to use DDIQ Analytics here as well to drive the trend to see that if you save for 2% or 5% of each month like how much money you can save to the end or at a certain period of time, then, how does it work, the user flow is what we have here.

Then the woman who maybe has a horrible issue, they will get an introduction from the Bank or the Welfare Service, about this product, and they can do the application online process in person, as usual. And then we can get the onboarding question, you know how much a percentage they want to set aside and they need to set up the secondary password.

And, they just need to wait for the access, because one thing we don’t want to happen is to have any notification just in case anyone you know, like for in an abusive relationship you don’t want to see anything pop up in their phone and see that she had the money hidden somewhere.

And then, this is a user journey that you can just log into the mobile banking app, as usual, but they’ll have the hidden location, for example, you might have to type in “help” like five time and this pop ups, you can see that this account will show you how much money you have saved during the course of the last six months or a year period.

And then you can use it when you need it in the future.

We have factored everything into consideration – since this was the FCA TechSprint we have concerns about the financial crime, you have to make sure that the product complys with any record later, so we already took everything into consideration.

And just to reiterate here, the sifted saving account just allows you to divert small amounts of money into a discrete account, and then you can have that at a nest egg to use it for the future . . . And this is my team.

Kody Gurfein | Co-Chair Exiger WINs: Thank you so much for taking us through this – it is really cool to see both of your demos, and your projects. I just can’t imagine doing all of this in such a short period of time, so congratulations again.

What strikes me on this slide is your team. You’ve got these incredible institutions and you and you’ve been an expert here for three years.

Jariya Laoriendee | Exiger Director and FCA TechSprint Participant: Yep

Kody Gurfein | Co-Chair Exiger WINs: And at Exiger you focus on data analytics and financial crime . . . So what was your role on this team, and then with these exciting and accomplished professionals — why did we choose DDIQ Analytics for this challenge?

Jariya Laoriendee | Exiger Director and FCA TechSprint Participant: Everyone chipped in on the team, but since there’s a lot of the data that I’ve worked with, I kind of wanted to look into this data, and then I wanted to be able to present it. I know what we can get from the data that we receive and DDIQ Analytics is easy to use and it can drive a lot of insights – that’s why I picked it. It’s easy and then within a few minutes you have a visualization of the data that can show everyone how much money a woman can save when they use this product.

Kody Gurfein | Co-Chair Exiger WINs: Something we talk about a lot at Exiger is this combination of subject matter expertise, coupled with the technology that is sort of the winning formula and it sounds like you added a ton of value to this team and to this project – so to both of you . . . thank you so much for joining us and for sharing this with us and our audience. We’re really proud of the work you did, and thank you for representing Exiger.

We hope everybody who’s watched this learned a little bit and has some new ideas on how they can make the world a bit of a safer place to do business, like you both did.