Data integration and AI are vital tools not only for delivering on customer experience but for combating fraud in equipment finance.
Global fraud and cybercrime losses are projected to reach $10.5 trillion in 2025, a 250% increase from $3 trillion a decade ago, driven largely by generative AI, according to a recent World Economic Forum report citing Cybersecurity Ventures data.
It can be a challenge to integrate data and AI onto lender platforms, but it is essential for fraud prevention and customer experience, Rohan Marfatia, chief executive of data and technology provider DataCRaiM, said during a panel discussion at the recent Equipment Finance Connect 2025 in Nashville, Tenn.
“You want to ensure that there is a single source of truth, and you are integrating that single source of truth, your OCI [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure], your Salesforce or your [Microsoft] Dynamics, with these third-party applications,” Marfatia said. “You need to be mitigating it from two perspectives: the business APIs that you are defining and … your end customer experience.
“When your CRM [customer relationship management platform] is empowered by talking to third-party applications, that’s when you can mitigate fraud,” he said. “You can monitor your portfolio, you can de-risk your portfolio and achieve your business outcomes.”
Companies can use internal and external data with vendor partners to develop AI operations, Scott Nelson, president and chief technology officer at St. Paul, Minn.-based Tamarack Technology, an equipment finance software provider, said during the panel.
“The first thing is that you know the scale with which AI can access and use data, primarily publicly available data,” he said. “There’s a number of vendor partners that can help and check that, and that’s going to be an area that is going to continue to grow.”
Fighting fraud, managing compliance
Technology and AI serve as a creative engine for modern society, providing individuals with new tools to be creative, but those tools are also in the hands of fraudsters, Nelson said.
“Fraud is a creative crime, so it’s going to help, and you’re going to have to have AI learning all the different things they’re trying,” he said. “Data, cross referencing data, and looking for discontinuities and things is going to be the first line of defense at this point, and there’s a number of parties that are out there that are out there already doing them.”
There are benefits to using tools such as credit reports and other third-party sources, but from a compliance perspective, it’s important to focus on clear communication within the organization instead of being crippled by fraud fears, Daryn Lecy, chief operating officer and senior vice president of Oakmont Capital, said during the panel.
“It can be that everybody’s so aware and hyper-alert that one instance of something can be a fraud attempt that stops the presses for the whole day, and everybody becomes fearful that every deal is fraud,” he said.
“Managing the expectations of what the tools are supposed to do, getting people to trust in what tools and departments responsible for them are using them for, and how that relates, so that if something is like credit and then moves out in little ways, that doesn’t stop funding all deals because of the still very small percentage.”
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