ACERCA DE ESTE EPISODIO
Setting the Stage: What Is First-Party Fraud?
First-party fraud = authenticated, fully KYC’d customers who are who they say they are… but “not doing nice things” (abuse, friendly fraud, promo gaming).
Shanthi Shanmugam
After 2021–2022, banks and deposit-heavy institutions saw a double-digit increase in fraud losses tied to their owncustomers rather than external attackers.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Traditional fraud stacks focus on onboarding and transaction gating; disputes and first-party fraud sit in an operational backwater with little data science or investment.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Shanthi’s Path to the Problem (Robinhood, Chime, and Disputes)
Shanthi spent six years at Robinhood working on everything but fraud (crypto launches, redesigns, support) until GameStop-era volumes forced her into the world of disputes.
Shanthi Shanmugam
She and her co-founder (ex-Chime) both realized a bad dispute experience was one of the top reasons a customer stopped using them as a primary financial relationship.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Institutions spend heavily to acquire customers at the front door and quietly lose them out the back door when disputes feel slow, opaque, or unfair.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Why Disputes Are So Broken Today
Many FIs outsource disputes to processors at $20–$40 per case; decisions take up to 90 days and often end with clawbacks that anger customers.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Regulation (e.g., 10 business days to provisionally credit) means banks often must take customers at face value even if follow-up questions go unanswered—driving poor loss performance.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Disputes teams historically sit in operations, not risk; they lack analytics, tooling, and esteem versus the “hyper sophisticated” fraud teams.
Shanthi Shanmugam
The Human Side: TikTok Guides, Entitlement, and “Universal Refund Centers”
Shanthi keeps a folder of TikToks, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads showing people teaching each other how to get “free money” via disputes.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Post-COVID economic stress plus a cultural shift (“it’s a big bank, they can afford it”) is normalizing first-party fraud in some segments.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Anecdotes like “Frank” (disputing a premium-economy seat, tepid Airbnb pool, and dry burgers after eating them) illustrate how banks are effectively being used as universal refund centers.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Casap’s Approach: Turn Disputes into a Trust & Retention Engine
Casap starts at the front of the process: guiding frontline agents to ask expert-level questions so they can distinguish green-flag truth-tellers from red-flag abusers.
Shanthi Shanmugam
This allows instant resolution for honest customers and higher scrutiny for likely fraudsters, balancing CX and fraud loss instead of forcing a tradeoff.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Results: clients see ~51% reduction in fraud losses in the first six months and can reduce or eliminate outsourced dispute processing—often “paying for Casap” in the first month.
Shanthi Shanmugam
One long-time disputes employee described Casap as life-changing—reducing stress so much she literally added saved therapy sessions into Casap’s ROI math.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Consortium Data and a “Casap Score”
Shanthi sees consortium data as essential: fraudsters share tactics, so institutions need a safe, anonymized way to share patterns.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Vision: a Casap-style trustworthiness score, analogous to FICO, that helps merchants and issuers decide when to add friction (e.g., step-up verification) rather than fully deny service.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Importantly, the score should drive which actions to limit (e.g., easy refunds on certain MCCs) rather than blanket account denials.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Agentic Payments, Liability, and AI as Equalizer
They explore future “agentic payments” use cases (e.g., an AI wedding planner overspending on the wrong things) and how liability might be allocated between customer, bank, and AI provider.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Shanthi is optimistic the industry can handle it with clear remits and parameters—potentially even “zero liability” offerings within defined agent budgets.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Vivek frames AI as a cost-cutting and CX-boosting equalizer for non-top-3 banks that cannot outspend megabanks on acquisition but can win on experience and efficiency.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Sales Momentum and Why FIs Are Moving Now
Casap has broken typical “slow FI sales” rules because it hits two urgent priorities: better CX for primary relationships and meaningful expense and fraud-loss reduction.
Shanthi Shanmugam
Banks, now laser-focused on PE multiples and cost ratios, are actively looking for software that removes expense and improves loss performance without massive core-system overhauls.
