A fintech pioneer founded in 2013, this banking unicorn rapidly emerged as a prominent player in the global banking and financial services landscape with 8 million customers. The company is at the forefront of the digital banking revolution, offering a range of innovative financial products and services to customers worldwide.
Since its founding, it has rapidly expanded its presence and customer base, with operations spanning across Europe, the United States, and other international markets.
To date, the company has raised close to US$ 1.8 billion from some of the world's most renowned investors.
We joined the Financial Crime Prevention team, which focused on sanctions, fraud prevention, money laundering & terrorism financing. With just one product manager overseeing all of the initiatives, additional help was needed to meet the company’s ambitious objectives. Given the recent restructuring, product management support became even more crucial to achieving set goals.
We were specifically allocated to focus on fraud prevention, where we were tasked with developing conditional programming algorithms aimed at boosting fraud detection and reducing manual investigation. This was particularly crucial as the company aimed to optimize resources amidst cost-cutting measures.
The company wanted to be innovative and surpass industry standards in its fraud prevention. To achieve this goal, we needed to drive priority initiatives and improve how the team worked with major stakeholders, including dedicated regulatory and fraud experts. Our mission was to deliver tangible results, positioning the company as a leader in combating fraudulent banking activities.
We immediately jumped into the Fraud Prevention team and completely took over all of the responsibilities from the previous product manager. Although we faced some difficulties with getting accounts quickly, we were still able to progress on the highest priority initiatives, run all scrum ceremonies with the tech team, and write tickets for upcoming developments. We also used this opportunity to re-examine the ways of working with the newly restructured team and find low-effort, high-impact ways to streamline collaboration.
First Deliverables and Results
Our objective was to enhance fraud detection capabilities through a new initiative, leveraging a segmented approach to ensure rapid value delivery and measurable success.
What was done:
The previous rules in place failed to identify missed fraud alerts, which impacted service reliability and fraud detection goals. A high number of false positive alerts required manual investigation and high demand on the service team, thus needing to be reduced.
What was done:
Due to the nature of fraud prevention, there were constant changes that needed to be quickly addressed. Additionally, there was a recent restructuring so that the ways of working between tech, product, and fraud experts had not yet been streamlined. This resulted in miscommunication and inefficient processes as the team dealt with ambiguous requirements, unclear priorities, and delays in development.
What was done:
💡 Reduced missed fraud alerts by over 50% within the first week and by 85% improvement thereafter by addressing underperformance in internal systems.
💡 Decreased the number of total fraud alerts by more than 50% while increasing detection rates by more than 30%, resulting in notable savings in manual investigation costs.
💡 Enhanced collaboration and efficiency among team members, leading to streamlined processes and improved fraud detection capabilities.
💡 Onboarded new PM & then transitioned to another team in the company to offer further product support
The mission lasted for 6 Months from September 2023 to March 2024. These are the reviews we received from our key stakeholders:
Staci joined our team as a Senior Product Manager and quickly made a difference in just four months, especially in one of [redacted company name]’s most challenging areas, Financial Crime Prevention. She quickly understood how our team works, what we do, and what our stakeholders need. She did a great job of sorting out these needs and adding them to our plans with detailed documentation. Her way of communicating is really effective, including with engineers. Although I had the opportunity to work with her for only a short period, her contributions were substantial and highly valuable.
Staci came into the team and was an excellent addition as [her] positiveness, product knowledge, stakeholder management skills and orientation to details was what we were looking to help us keep moving forward in the right direction and helping improve many areas where we need it strong support. She managed to quickly understand the domain, identify improvement areas and guide the team towards the company goals. I fully recommend work with her.
I had the pleasure of working closely with with Juan Pablo for one of his mission as a Product Manager where he served as a pivotal member of our team. He consistently impressed me with his working attitude, strategic thinking and innovative problem-solving skills. It was simple for him to translate complex ideas into actionable plan by quickly understanding our user needs, biggest gaps we had as a Product team and exceptional analytical skills. Among his greatest strenghts I would highlight his collaborative approach, as he fostered a culture of open communication and cross-functional teamwork, bringing together engineers and stakeholders to align on project goals and priorities. I will be extremely happy if I get the opportunity to work again with him and I'm 100% sure he will have plenty of success stories as a Product Manager.
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