Assets
More than 100,000 members and $2.3 billion in assets
Elements Financial is an employer-based credit union that partners with more than 200 organizations to offer financial products directly to employees. Originally founded in 1930 by Eli Lilly and Company, Elements now serves members in all 50 states and more than 50 countries, with a focus on financial education and empowering financial wellness and success.
Elements seeks to make their onboarding process as easy and frictionless as possible. They deliver an exceptional member experience with accessible products that meet their members’ needs and match their expectations. To grow both deposit dollars and to open same-day memberships, Elements needed a solution that would reduce manual reviews, lead to more automatic approvals of digital applications, and integrate easily with Blend — their cloud-based banking platform.
Prior to choosing Alloy as their Identity Risk Solution, Elements reviewed every customer application manually, and they were not able to verify information through multiple data sources simultaneously. Instead, the review teams would sign into each data source separately, key in the appropriate information, and then log the results.
Elements has a service-level agreement (SLA) with members, promising that their account will be open within one business day. However, when applications increased past a certain threshold — such as during a promotional campaign — their review teams struggled to meet the SLA. Elements also needed a solution that would not just decrease approval time but allow for auto-approvals and auto-declines when appropriate.
While tackling these challenges, mitigating fraud was also top of mind as they prepared to onboard more members. Ultimately, they started a search for third-party providers to solve for their challenges and chose Alloy.
With Alloy, Elements saves time and resources. Now, Elements can choose from Alloy’s 190+ data sources and incorporate those choices into a singular workflow that doesn't require separate log-ins or manual entry. This allows Elements to automate more of their decisioning processes.
Prior to implementation, Elements’ review teams used Alloy’s training portal, Learn Alloy Better (LAB), and attended training sessions to fully understand how different data source configurations would affect the workflow. Elements also conducted backtesting with months’ worth of prior applications to view projected outcomes and see how their manual decisioning compared to automated decisioning via Alloy. During backtesting, Elements identified several customized workflow modifications to ensure the results wouldn’t cause too many auto-approvals or denials.
Ashley Sellers - Digital Product Analyst at Elements Financial
In addition to the obvious benefits of automation, Elements appreciates that Alloy gives them the ability to modify their workflow on an as-needed basis so they can adjust for different member segments and financial offerings. Their teams can make these changes quickly and independently, so Elements has the agility to verify more thin-file applicants without increasing their risk.
Amanda Arthur - Assistant Vice President of Product Management at Elements Financial
Now, Elements saw a 40% increase in auto-approval rate for new members. They also leverage the same decisioning for existing members who are adding new accounts.
Elements has also strengthened their fraud prevention efforts with Alloy. For example, when a suspicious increase in applications caught the review team's attention, they analyzed this influx at a faster rate and noticed certain trends.
Namely, they were able to identify that the fraudsters used the same IP address and similar phone numbers with only slight variations across multiple applications. There were also similar capitalization patterns among the personally identifiable information (PII). Because they were able to quickly identify these synthetic fraud applications, Elements did not have to switch back to a manual review process or affect their member experience. They could continue business as usual, knowing that the workflow they developed with Alloy would catch fraudulent applications that had received auto-approval before the fraudsters could withdraw funds.
Elements also sent more than 800 of the fraudulent applications to Alloy’s experts, who analyzed the fraudulent behavior and suggested workflow changes that would increase Elements’ ability to stop synthetic fraud while flagging fewer good customers. Their recommendations included adjusting existing data sources like Socure and adding new data sources like SentiLink. Again, Elements conducted a backtest to evaluate the results with SentiLink, and felt comfortable adding the new data source less than a month after the initial event occurred.
Amanda Arthur - Assistant Vice President of Product Management at Elements Financial
Looking ahead, Elements is excited to explore their future roadmap with Alloy. They are interested in Journeys — Alloy’s feature for multi-step application flows — so they can continue to decrease friction for members who are applying for multiple products.
Amanda Arthur - Assistant Vice President of Product Management at Elements Financial
Overall, Alloy gives Elements more time and freedom to focus on strategic initiatives, data-driven decisions, and a proactive approach to fraud prevention.