Advanced Fraud Solutions Leadership: A conversation with Ted Josephson

What's up, fraud fighters? Welcome back to Fraud Forward. Today's[a] conversation is one I've been looking forward to for a long time, because every once in a while you meet someone in the industry who doesn't just manage fraud. They lead people. They shape strategy. They elevate the entire room. And when I think of Ted Josephson, the words that immediately come to my mind are true leader, not because of the title, not because of the scale, but because of the way he shows up. Ted is the VP of Bank Fraud and Credit Strategy at Synchrony Financial, operating at a level where decisions impact millions of accounts, billions in exposure, and the trajectory of enterprise risk. But what stands out to me most is he's constantly promoting his team, highlighting their wins, elevating their voices, giving credit publicly, and taking responsibility privately. In an industry that can feel reactive and high pressure, that kind of leadership is intentional. And today we're not just talking about fraud losses or AI or strategy at scale. We're talking about what it actually means to lead fraud prevention at enterprise level, where fraud meets credit, where operational reality meets long-term strategy, and where the responsibility isn't just to stop bad actors, but to build resilient systems and empowered teams. So Ted, I'm incredibly honored to have you here with me today.

Thank you. I feel like the honor is all mine. I always chuckle that anybody would want to listen to me opine. I have a ton of opinions on things, but I enjoy what I do. I work with great people. I get a chance to meet great people. And from a teamwork standpoint, I have been blessed with the best of the best to work with. If I could give a chance to talk about them and my journey, I'll keep going as long as you want to hear me.

Well, we want to hear you. We're here for it. So I am very excited to have you on not only because it's a conversation with Ted Josephson, right? But it's also one that I felt was very important to bring to the audience of Fraud Forward. We're really moving into this realm of making sure that we are in a position to have a seat at the table, making sure that fraud does become part of that strategy, that conversation that we're having with the executives. I really wanted to bring the perspective of someone that has sat in this role for a good amount of time, has great experience, and also can bring that perspective that maybe those of us that are from that community banking role can really try to understand where you're at and where your mind is and how you do think strategically. So I'm really incredibly excited to bring this conversation on and so happy it's with you.

Thanks.

So of course we're going to start with the origin story. I love to start there. I always start mine with, I was once a teller and that was how I got into this crazy world of fraud. So I'd love to know how you got into fraud and credit risk.

Well, it is kind of a funny story. Now, I consider myself a man of faith, and I believe that every moment in my life, every cusp moment, God has made it very clear what he wants me to do. And back in the day, I was fresh out of college, I left an investment firm that I was with because it was summertime and I wanted to sit on the beach and relax. And I happened to be sitting there and I heard some people behind me and it was an old friend. And they had just gotten hired at a bank in the area, People's Bank. And I said, oh, that sounds nice. And they said, go apply. So I wound up going into the management training program with me and 19 other internal people. And that was kind of the beginning of my journey. I've worked in the branch systems. I've had robbers. I've locked the door when gunfire is outside. I've done a chunk of operations, I've run call centers, I've set up websites. I've had a fun career and I hate boredom. I hate to do the same thing all the time and God has arranged my life so I have this wonderful opportunity to try new things every few years. And so I've never been bored. There came a time about 10 years ago when there had been some management changes and I got let go. And I was like, oh, that's no fun. After 30 years, I saw it coming because it was a demand for change and you want your own team. I get it. Nothing personal. And I was like, okay. So I came home to my wife and I told her, and there were some emotions with that. But we prayed and we said, God's got this. It's not like he's going to be surprised. Two days later, I had a friend call me, hey, would you be interested in this job? Sure. So I wound up working for E-Trade for a bit. And I was doing seven hours a day commuting. That was super fun. And then I went to a friend's funeral and there were a bunch of people there. One of the people said, hey, Synchrony's got an opening. Would you like to come? And they said it's a fraud thing. And I'm like, I'm not really a fraud guy. I'm a banker. I do everything. And she said, no, no, no, that's what they want.

Very true.

They called me back two hours later. I put it on LinkedIn two hours later. They interviewed me. I went through seven people. The first five, I said, I don't think you want me. I'm like, you want somebody who lives and breathes fraud. Like the only thing I care about is that people don't lose a dime. I said, I'm not that guy. I'm going to look out for the whole thing. I've got a bigger picture than that, but I don't want any surprises. Each person said no, so after the fifth person said, no, no, no, you're what we want, I said, okay, it's on you. It's not me anymore. So I came in and had a basic knowledge of fraud, but I spent the next couple of years diving in with a lot of great fraud professionals. And like I referenced before, I've got my BFFs, my best fraud friends. That's a good chunk of the cadre that even now are people I can call. I've got my phone here with a listing of them and we share stories and pictures and we help each other out.

Yep.

That was the best part about fraud. I could ask any stupid question and people in the room would answer it and shockingly other people in the room didn't know but were too embarrassed to ask the question. So I learned, listen, go outside your comfort zone and be willing to learn even at an older age and you can have a great experience. And that's how I got started in fraud.

I love that and can relate to that so much on so many different levels. I also am a woman of faith and I feel like I am right where I'm supposed to be. There's no other way that this career makes sense if I'm not here for a reason. So I'm hoping that this voice and this really loud personality is here for a reason and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I really appreciate that perspective. And then the best fraud friends, I tell you, I would not be here today without those that I can ask the stupid question to. I have those that I call that are specifically for compliance, for BSA, those that are for fraud. And I do banks, credit unions, and I'm like, hey, what are we thinking about this? What does this look like? Because that's the beauty of even this podcast, that Hailey doesn't know everything, but she knows a lot of people and she can talk to those people and we can get some different perspectives in. I love that so much and definitely have felt also that you can call anyone in this industry and they are very willing to help or at least can point you in the right direction to get the right answer.

Yeah, we just want to help. If we're trying to stop bad guys, who doesn't want to help with that?

Exactly. It's all for the common good of the people. We don't want fraud. So I'd love to know if there was a defining moment that shaped how you think about risk today.

It probably goes back more to my branch days. Remember I said that I used to lock the door. I worked in an inner city branch where it was not uncommon that you would hear gunfire outside. Now this branch was robbed more than a few times. And I grew up a very suburban guy and this was a very urban setting. And to go into that and have gunfire going on outside, your reaction was you just go and you lock the door. You wait 10 minutes after the gunfire is done and you unlock the door again. It's the perception of risk in that moment. I could have been cowering in a corner not able to do anything. But you realize that I believe my life is in God's hands. You have to live in the moment, do the right things and not be overwhelmed by the risk that you're surrounded by. Try to make good decisions. And to me, the good decision in that moment was, let's lock the door. But as I approach fraud, it's the same thing. I think a good chunk of common sense in approaching the risk for what it is, and is this going to destroy the institution or is this going to be an annoyance or somewhere in between, and then trying to make a balanced response to that, this is critical.

I definitely love that you are truly showing that enterprise level of thought process of risk. Whereas you're like, yeah, we just calmly go and lock the door. And I'm like, yeah, no, that's the reason why I got off the teller row and went up to bookkeeping so that I could be in a locked area. Like you got to go up the elevator and go through some locked doors with a code before you can get to me. And then even still I'm right beside the document vault. So they're not getting me, I'm going in there. I'm locking myself in. So very risk averse on this side. And especially whenever it comes to even my normal safety, but completely understand and appreciate that. I know that, at least from my experience, I don't think of risk in that way for everything holistically, but when I think of fraud and I compare my payments knowledge with that, it does so much for our understanding of what we can do, what we can't do, where we can intervene. And so I love that idea of that holistic understanding and how you're able to provide that in the risk-based setting. So I just wanted to call that out. Absolutely love that. So when did you realize leadership required a completely different skill set than investigation?

That was probably back more in my call center days. You're dealing with a very diverse group, very frontline people. First time in the workforce, you've got your operations team that's the seniors, some of your technical people, salespeople, and trying to adapt your toolkit. We all carry our management toolkit. And realizing that my toolkit, which had been dealing with only professional people up to that point, I needed to expand it and learn that for this situation, I need to be able to change it up and feel good about it. A call center team, I don't know if you have had a chance to work with them, they tend to be very collegial. It's like a big family because it's a giant call center. So you have to treat them with a sense of not just camaraderie, but care and concern. And my dad taught me that it was important to care about the people in his life. When he died at his funeral, I had over 40 men come by me and say, Ted, your dad was my best friend. Now, I know who my dad's best friends were. Not every one of them was. But every single one of them felt that way. And I was like, you know what? If I can be that in other people's lives when I've been given the gift of being part of their management and helping them grow as people, grow in their career, whatever it might be, or deal with the crisis. If I can be that guy where they look back and they say, Ted spoke into my life. He spoke wisdom and God's love into my life. That's all I want. I don't care what project, I can't remember any of my projects because I've worked on them, but I remember people.

It means so much to hear that from a leader's role too. I've seen it from the outside of you and your team. I've honestly kind of sat there with a little bit of jealousy. I know I don't need to be jealous, but it was so great to see that camaraderie and that spirit of, family sounds cliche, but it does look like it's a group that cares about each other and about the work that you guys are doing. So it's just been very inspiring to see from the outside. And then I do have one final question as a part of the origin story, to get us from analyst or operator to executive level. And that is, what's a belief that you held early in your career about fraud that you've since changed your mind on?

Probably that the people doing it were scumbags. Very binary. Horrible person. And realizing there's just nuances. I don't want to say gray. I mean, you're breaking the law. You're breaking the law. First party fraud, even if you're a willing collaborator in it. You've got some moral issues there. But there are the truly heinous folks funding human trafficking and all that who deserve judgment. And then there are some people who are just wounded souls in the midst of it. So yeah, I've probably developed a lot more grace, even though some of my BFFs might say I'm snarky. I give a fair amount of grace. I would like people to be a little smarter in some of their choices. I've learned.

Very true. And I'll tell you, I've said this before on the podcast. When the movie Beekeeper came out, there was this sense of gratification I felt when that building blew up. I was like, yes. But then at the same time, I'm like, but in reality, we can't go blow up the scam centers because we know that they're full of victims. So we can't do that. I don't know how to feel.

I watch Aaron's posts and I'm like, these poor people. Yeah, so I've learned to have a broader view.

Yes, 100%. We have to or else it's not going to work. Okay, so I'd love to shift into our next segment which is talking about where fraud and credit collide. I think your title that blends fraud and credit strategy is just absolutely fascinating. Where do fraud and credit most often intersect, do you believe?

It's funny. I'm a bit of a unicorn within the company because of it. When I came on board at Synchrony, one of the odd things to me was, I was used to fraud teams being embedded in operations or reporting into credit differently. The team I was working for, my official title was portfolio credit manager. And I was working with all of these credit people doing credit things. Their entire lives was credit. And so I'd sit in a meeting for two hours and they'd all talk about their stuff. And most of the time it would have nothing to do with what I was dealing with from the banking fraud side. It was a learning experience for me about how they do intersect. We had lots of discussions. Is this a credit loss at acquisition or is this a fraud loss? And so being a simple man, I said, listen, we can't nuance this. I've got frontline people, we're taking it all as fraud loss and we'll just handle the budget. It's all on the same bottom line anyway. We'll deal with that. Yeah, I think the intersection mostly happens as you get into some of the newer, more nuanced products. Like a debit product where you've got some credit aspects in the payment vehicle or in the approval process. Then I start to say, I think there's some nuances there that honestly, I don't think the industry does a great job of defining. I can't tell you how many times I've been in Nacha fraud roundtables and it is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. You bring up a topic and someone says, I do it this way. Well, we used to do it that way. Now I do it this way. And now this is credit. Now this is fraud. And I'm like, but how does your frontline team sort that out? They don't. They're just throwing a dart at the board. So we made it very simple from my standpoint, simply because I like clear reporting. I can tell you exactly what happened as opposed to here's a number that's two different things in it. And I feel it's mostly this one, but I can't tell you where it all breaks out. I'm just going to say it's all this. Here's my definition of it. If you don't like it, feel free to go back and change it.

Yeah, no, it absolutely did. It definitely gives us an understanding of where you're seeing it intersect, where truly this line of business could technically be by itself. This one could be by itself also, but it just made more sense to bring together and then how you can definitely see utilizing the tools of which one maybe will fall into fraud, which one will belong to an onboarding issue with credit, and so on. So yeah, no, I think you definitely did. It does lead me to another question though. What do fraud leaders misunderstand about credit, do you think?

It's probably, it's weird, I think for fraud leaders, some of the lower score credit approvals seem like a mistake. We all understand why it's done, but you're like, give me somebody with a low credit score. They've hurt people in the past. Clearly there's a reason they have a low score and it's still the right thing to do to give them all the right things. But as a fraud person, you go, no, I don't want to give you another shot. So it's that risk tolerance and the risk reward ratio. A fraud person doesn't have a lot of risk reward. Like if you take a fraud loss, your executive team looks at you and goes, what is wrong with you? Why did you let this happen? You take a credit loss as a part of the business and you're able to show revenue against it, especially on the deposit side. I don't have a lot of revenue to show. I took a million dollar loss. Hey, that's why it's worth it. So I think that's it. I think it's just a fundamental perspective. I can do credit. I've done credit. I've written loans. I've done all sorts of things. I get it. But once I've been a fraud guy, I'm much less tolerant of the risk related to it. I'd probably be somebody who would be a horrible credit leader at this point because I don't want to trust anybody. Best of the best. 740s and above.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. And so the vice versa of that is, what do credit leaders misunderstand about fraud, which I think you kind of answered in both of that. And I remember like, and speaking to the fraud practitioner, I can remember when we would get the credit apps or we'd review a loss. It started with, well, we have no loan losses. And I was like, well, we are magical. No fraud, low losses in loans. Come on now, let me see. I'd like to take a look at some of these. And so we'd start looking and I'd go, okay, well, here's an issue. Obviously this is something I would not have approved because of X, Y or Z. But here's where we can look additionally and make some changes. I'm just curious, if this guy works in Texas, how does he live in South Carolina? How does this work? It says that he's a crane operator.

That's weird.

I don't think that it works that way. Like, can we talk through this? And so it's been interesting, but just wondering if you had vice versa advice for credit leaders.

Yeah, I think credit leaders, because they're usually being driven by the revenue side, are probably working with marketing partners. So they have some acquisition goals and sales goals that the fraud leaders, I don't want to say don't have. We're all in charge of the customer experience. We're all in charge of the bottom line. But people do what they're incented to do, what they're paid to do. I'm incented to stop fraud or manage fraud in a reasonable and rational way, not let it go rogue. Their incentive is more sales oriented. As much as you can get out of here without taking undue credit losses. I think if they just understood that the pressure on us is a little more binary. And nobody really wants the fraud protection until you start bleeding out the eyes. Say you get an attack and you hear, why did you let this happen? Well, I had five rules in place that would have stopped this, but you said it was reducing the acquisition rate. And so we took them off because we were willing to take the risk. But now we see the other side of it. So it's more of extending grace to each other. And I would say most of the credit leaders I've ever dealt with have been very good that way. But marketing people have a harder time in general. Credit leaders get it because they're on the edge too. The marketing teams have a little harder time with it because their whole job is sales. I don't care what it is, just give me all the sales you can get.

I have had multiple conversations where I could concur with that exact statement. But just because I feel the need to ask, did you ever get that sense of true validation whenever they would ask, why are we taking these losses? And you're like, I tried months ago. You told me no. You told me I couldn't have this rule in place. Just wondering.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

I love that. That's the best.

So, yeah. Yes. I think we've all had those moments where we've been validated and we don't have to rub it in their face and say, hey, you remember that thing that I've been talking about for the last two years? When that thing happens, you only have to vaguely reference it. Because everybody's like, you know, and I said, this is why that thing I think we needed to do and invest in is super important right now, because you want this not to happen again, right? And so to me that's, it's the nature of business. But if you have something that validates you, don't just take the joy of being right. Get something good out of it. And good being, protect the institution, protect your customers. That's the bottom line. Our job is to stop the bad guys from doing all the horrible stuff that they do.

Right.

And if we don't grow with the fraud guys' capabilities, and we just, what's the old saying? Fraud is not dragon slaying. It's zombie fighting. Dragon slaying, I kill the dragon, I win, I'm done. No, it's zombie fighting. I just am getting ready for the next wave and each wave gets harder. So we need to invest to keep getting better.

I love that and so appreciate the wisdom of you, Ted, so much in that. And yes, never let it go to waste. And whenever it happens, just say, and also, don't forget about this one that I warned you about too. Just a slight little, hey, just another reminder.

Build the credibility. Build the credibility at work.

That's right. So I don't want to use the word hated. It feels so negative, but I'm going to use the word hated to make sure that I get this point across. I hated whenever I would have to argue a fraud point and say, no, look, I'm definitely here for the members. I don't want there to be any friction that's not needed. I want to help out. But at the same time, if all we're doing is making them answer yes or no on a text message, I don't feel like that's friction. I feel like it's worth it to us. Being able to have that backup data later to prove it, because I went into a fraud role, they hired me for fraud, and then I had to write up a memo to get a rule approved, and I had to get it approved by two out of three executives. That's hard to do on a Friday at 3:30 p.m. That is impossible. And that's even whenever I had the buy-in from executives. They liked the fraud girl, but find one at 3:30 on a Friday. Tell me where they are. Find two, because that's what I needed.

Yeah, and you need it now and you need to have your device here so you can press the right buttons, yep.

Exactly. Can I get you this memo on Monday and do it now? Like that'd be great. Yeah, so a final question about credit and fraud. Should fraud losses be treated as operational failures or portfolio pricing input?

I would say portfolio pricing input. We all know how to stop fraud, stop doing business. We're not omniscient, we're not going to stop everything. My local bank, if Ted decides to go rogue today, I've been a great customer there for the last 10 years, if I decide to go rogue today, there's a very good chance I'm going to get away with it because we can't just distrust everybody 100% or the business is shut down. So yeah, I think you have to treat it as a cost of doing business and it's okay to have it and set reasonable parameters on it. Sadly, not every executive I've dealt with over the years is able to do that. But fortunately in my career lately, more often than not, you don't get that reflexive gross overreaction. It's like, okay, we get it. It's within the budget. It's within our risk appetite. It's all good. But we're going to keep taking losses of this nature unless we stop doing this.

I love that. I think that truly this is an understanding or a perspective that I haven't been able to bring on before. So you being here is just going to bring so much wealth of knowledge to the listeners and I'm so appreciative of you being here.

I do have one thing I wanted to mention. You used the word friction before, and I don't know if you've hit my hot button over the last year. Don't use the F word. Friction is the F word for a fraud fighter. We have shot ourselves in the foot as a group because we call it friction. And what is friction? Friction feels bad. It burns. It's protection. We only advocate appropriate protection for the vulnerable and for the company.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so if we use the word friction, that immediately gives the ammunition to your executive team, your marketing people, or whoever is against it. We don't want friction with our customers. That's not the customer experience thing. No, but we do want protection.

We do. I love that. My favorite quote is from Karen Boyer and she says, fraud prevention is the new customer service and fraud is the new friction. I love that when she says that. So I definitely appreciate that perspective and it fully resonates. That might be my next tattoo. I'll just put friction as the F word. So, okay. I want to talk about leading at enterprise scale. What changes when you go from protecting thousands of accounts to millions of accounts?

Well, you become invested in the corporate overhead. You become part of the process. You're not in the weeds stopping the fraud. You're making the justification for the support systems and policies and procedures and all that other fun stuff to people who may not get it. May not care about it. Find it goes against what they want. Or they're believers, but they just haven't had a chance. They don't know the fraud. So you spend a lot of your time educating people and you've got to educate people who are generally senior to you who don't like to be educated because they're smarter than you. If there's that hierarchy, not again, this is not everybody, but as a general approach, as a leader, you have to be willing to educate without looking like you're educating and impart the information in a way that makes it feel like they already knew this, but you're just bringing out some of the nuances to make sure the rest of the team would get it. And then part of it is learning how to be the bad cop. Sadly, I still think the idea of bad cop, good cop works within fraud departments. Now, it's tough on the bad cop. I've had to be the bad cop a lot. But if you do that, you're able to make the point. Because if you have a particular issue that they're a bit intransigent on, or there's a deadline, got to do this, two weeks from now, and we're like, here are the 15 things that could go wrong with that and why we're not going to do that. And then maybe Johnny or Susie over here, they'll see what we can do working with that. So the team becomes an enabler because my goal is I want to make a stance so that then the team looks like the problem solvers, the miracle solvers. Because I'm not smart enough to know the way that maybe this is a train wreck and there's no way around it. But I want to give them an opportunity to do that and I'll be supportive of everything new. But if they come back and say this is a train wreck, then so be it. And when I say no, I say it nicely, you know, within my role here, guys, this really feels like a bad thing. Let's go back and look at it, but let's not set the date to launch something without having looked at the issues that could inflict harm on the innocent or the company. And remember, don't let the crisis go to waste. Remember that horrible thing that happened here? Let's not have that happen.

100%. I loved whenever I would find out about a new product and it was when marketing was releasing it out to the public telling me about it. And I'm like, what are we doing? No.

Why did my fraud alerts go through the roof? What is going on?

Yeah, something didn't work. What's happening here? Yeah, no, completely have been there. One question that popped into my mind almost immediately was, was it hard transitioning out of the weeds? One of the things that I was struggling with, getting into more of a leader type, manager type role, was not being in the day to day of every alert and knowing what was hitting, what was not. And we've got to get at scale and we've got to be able to look at everything. But fraud fighter to fraud fighter, was that a hard transition for you also?

Absolutely, and it's something I've talked to the team about a lot. Whenever we see new leaders come in, whether it's me or we bring in new team members, the first thing we all do is we go to where we're comfortable. And if we come out of the weeds, we get back into the weeds. So when I started in this role, it happened to pay off for me because I had to get into the weeds to really understand fraud in order to be able to step back out of it. But once you're in there, it's kind of fun. I mean, fraud fighting is fun. Everyone's a puzzle and you've got all this cool stuff. But again, my dad had told me hire the best people and then get out of their way, enable them, but get out of their way. And so that's what I did, but it was hard because that's the fun stuff. I don't want to be in this team meeting over here explaining for the 15th time how ACH works. I'd love to be in the weeds doing this with the team I love, but again, it's all roles and you do what you're good at. I fortunately have a variety of things. So I'd rather have them do the fun stuff that they're better at. And that's why we take one for the team. And it's fun. You work the deal right. It's got some level of satisfaction.

Yeah, love that. I love whenever we would get those internal highlights of, hey, we stopped this fraud today. And then you look through and you're like, I bet that was awesome whenever you first figured it out. If only we could feel that moment one more time. So, again, thinking about scale, what does a bad week look like at scale?

A new creative attack. What's been the bane of our world is that there's so much clean PII out there that's been stolen. And we don't have great tools for first party fraud. Let's all be honest. What's the moment where you suddenly realize from a data point that Ted's gone rogue? Because I happened to look at a Facebook post that incented me to do this or my daughter saw that and now they're participating in a fraud thing. Those are the rough ones where there's not a lot of great data points. And so it's fun to figure out what it is, but that initial moment is rough. There's nothing jumping out at me here on what is the problem. And until you find that, there is a huge level of stress because you've got to go, okay, how do I go nuclear on this if I have to? If I can't figure something out in the next day or week, whatever it might be, I'm going to have to go nuclear on this. And that's going to be a problem. Like we all know that's going to go up the line and that's going to be a problem. So that's the hardest part. Fortunately, generally there's a way around it and you don't have to go nuclear, but that's the stress moment, especially when there's a couple of larger dollar ones in there that sit up and take notice.

Right. Whenever you get a call and it goes, we've got a problem. And you're like, why? And it's always the first party ones because they're taking advantage of systems that you have in place that only the account owner would be able to authorize or get past. And it's like, it would have worked if you weren't trying to manipulate a system.

Right. Yeah, those are the ones that I worry about the industry for because we've become, I call it the curse of the pandemic, but it's casual, friendly fraud. All of the people who learned that Amazon would give them a thing if they just told them they didn't get it. And I think a lot of people became comfortable with that. They're sitting at home and nobody's enforcing anything and all these Facebook posts saying make a thousand dollars doing this or doing that. We seem to have trained a new generation of friendly fraud.

Yeah, who see nothing wrong with it.

Right, and arguably, what's the odds of somebody getting prosecuted for a $2,000 or $3,000 thing?

Just a little slap on the wrist.

Yeah, if that.

If that, yeah. Those were the days, except they were bad days for us fraud fighters. Another question that is really important to me, as I even think about my career and where am I going to be in 20 years, but one thing that means honestly the most to me is, how do you stay connected to frontline realities and to your frontline team members in a role such as yours?

You have to be intentional. A lot of one-on-ones, a lot of meetings outside of the meeting. So when I say outside of the meeting, like ping them on Teams, hey, how you doing? What's going on? Anything fun going on? What's up? You heard there's something happening. You don't want to be the micromanager, but you want to show that you care and you want to be supportive. And I do it outside of my team too. I have my immediate team, and then we have the operations team. So I want to check in. If I know what's going on for them, be supportive. Again, that's my approach. I want to make sure that they all know we're all in this together. And I want to do what I can to help and not be a pain and show recognition when you can outside of their normal channels. I don't think people get enough recognition. When somebody outside of your group comes to you and says, you did a great job, I was really impressed, it's a world of difference and nobody does it enough. So those are the types of things that I think make a difference. It's about connections to people. It's about reaching out to my BFFs. You've got to talk to people. If you're not connected, you've got nothing. LinkedIn's fine. There's a lot of good interesting posts out there.

But it can get a little salesy, let's be honest. Yeah, no, I can't tell you how much that perspective means to me, just because it was one thing that mattered the most to me as a fraud practitioner, because I was the fraud fighter of one for an organization and I depended so much on my frontline and they did so much in the fight against fraud that any chance I could give them a Scooby snack, which is what I was doing as my way to promote them internally, it not only helped but it also shifted the perspective of the executives that fraud was no longer looked at as a negative, but instead it was a positive because it was like, these people are doing great things when it comes to fraud prevention. What happened with fraud this month? So it means the world hearing that, even at scale, we can still be intentional and we can still have those connections with our front lines.

Yeah, we are constantly doing what we can so that when somebody does a good job, I'm jumping in, some of the other players are jumping in and sending a note to the person and their boss and probably their boss's boss. Just saying, wow, you guys rocked. Just thanks, short and sweet. But it pays dividends in terms of then they care, they're going to invest more and get better because you're incentivizing the proper behavior.

Right.

I don't have to go and give accolades to people who didn't do the right thing. I incentivize the proper behavior and I'll get more of it.

Love that. And the opposite question of that. What do you think is the fastest way a fraud leader can lose credibility internally?

Take credit for everything. Sadly somebody popped into my mind for that. It's all about me. I'm the reason we're all smart. Everybody gets it. They all realize that that's what's happening. The person thinks that they're showing off and they look like a schmuck to anybody who's got a real view on it, and it discourages the team because why am I going to try? Nobody's ever going to care or notice me in this. And then that becomes the incentive to leave the team and go find somebody else where maybe somebody will care about them.

Yeah, completely agree. And you say someone popped into your mind immediately? Same. I have one of those as well. Okay, two more questions for our first segment. The first is, at enterprise scale, what do you think is more dangerous? Is it moving too fast on fraud controls or moving too slow?

I would probably say generally moving too slow. Because that's our world. This is the world of model governance that takes nine months to a year to get a new model approved. We are stuck with so many well-intentioned, and in many cases needed, controls that stop us from going too fast. But the fraudsters have none of that. And so if I'm going to be able to be effective, I need to be a bit more nimble than our processes encourage us to be. And again, we do what we're incented to do. Fraud fighters still, sometimes a lot of the incentive is just to sit back and follow the process and not fight hard. But by the nature of a good fraud fighter, you actually care. So you're going to push the envelope, which doesn't always make you friends in the process. But you've got to be willing to push the envelope on it and set a process that'll allow you to get away with that without getting in trouble.

100% agree. Okay, final question for this part one. If someone shadowed you for a week, what would surprise them most about your job?

Probably how good my team is. I have got people I work with that are just really good at their jobs. Not everybody gets that visibility, but the team is shockingly good and holy cow diverse in all of the aspects of thinking and approaching things that makes it fun. I think that's what comes up most. My team is so good that it makes the job fun. Even in horrible stress, in long hours, and just for extended periods, it's a shockingly fun role. I wish I had known about fraud earlier in my career because I was like, I missed out on so much. I did some great stuff. But this is the best, and the best people. Bankers are good people, but if I never sell another checking account, have to take credit for one more checking account, I'm fine with that. If I stop one more fraudster, I'm excited. That's a day.

That's right. If we can prevent one more victim, please. That's all we need. Love that.

Fraud fighters, if you're listening to this and thinking, this feels different. It is. Because what we just unpacked wasn't tactics. It was transformation. We talked about the journey from banker to fraud leader, from operator to strategist, from being in the weeds to leading at scale. We talked about fraud and credit colliding, about friction being the wrong word or the F word. We talked about credibility, about culture, about what it really means to lead when the stakes are high. And maybe the biggest takeaway is that fraud leadership isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about building a room full of smart people and then elevating them. In part two, we're going even deeper. We're talking AI, automation, agentic commerce, regulatory tension, and what actually keeps enterprise fraud leaders up at night. If part one was about the journey, part two is about the future. And trust me, you don't want to miss it. See you in part two.