Smarter Alerts, Smarter Decisions What’s New in TrueChecks-20250827_170008UTC-Meeting Recording

August 27, 2025, 4:00PM

59m 13sBrynn Johnson 0:06

Welcome everyone. We’re just making sure everybody’s getting into the meeting and then I’ll get our slide deck shared and we will get started. My name is Bryn and I’m head of marketing at AFS, so.

All right. First, thank you everyone for joining. We’re right at the top of the hour, so we’re going to try to be very prompt with our time. What I would love first of all is for those of you on the meeting, please indicate in the chat that you can hear and see.

Everything.

Can you hear me? That’s the first thing can see and hear. Awesome. Thanks everyone. And that also proves to me that you all know how to use the chat. So chat is where everything will be happening and I will do my best to to check the chat while we’re we’re moving and grooving.

But just know that we have teams and people that will be in there and trying to catch your questions. Chat’s probably the best place for questions, but there is A. Q&A module, but I find that chat is A. little bit easier. But if you want to use Q&A, go ahead and use it and.

The other piece I wanted to say is this will be recorded. That’s A. big question. Do not worry. Do not frantically think that you need to take notes. We’re not back in high school where you’re you’re trying to keep up. We got this. We will send this to you. This is information we want you all to have, to share and to learn and to refer back to. So.

Yes, this will be recorded and now I will go ahead and share. Team members, let me know. Can you see the first screen? Smarter alerts, Smarter decisions. What’s new in true techs?

We’re good. OK, we have A. hand up.Donold Arnold 1:56

Brynn, it keeps popping over to your team’s screen as well.

Brynn Johnson 1:58
Yeah, yeah. I’m trying to make sure that I can stay. I want to make sure that I can toggle back and forth. But OK, OK, well, let’s just get started. I will do my best to go ahead and.
See what I need to see while I’m leading it. OK, smarter alerts, smarter decisions. What’s new in True Shacks? Thank you everybody for joining. We’re really excited to dive in. For those of you that have been on our webinars before, you know how this goes. We’re really about teaching. We’re really about hands on. So it’s going to be A. lot about.
You know, learning through examples, learning from our awesome support team who are, you know, in the fields really doing this work. So, but you’ll see I have something up here, A. poll. I’m going to go ahead and get the poll live with if I can.
So one second, wait for the poll, but I’m going to go ahead and move after move through so that the poll can come up later. But before we get started, I’m going to talk to you about what we’ll learn today. So what’s new with alerts, A. live walkthrough of key Features and updates. Again, we’re going to do examples.
We want to show you what’s happening with Truecheck’s alert optimization so you can make things really easy and customizable for your FI. And then we’re going to talk through some reporting and how you can use that reporting to further enhance what you’re doing to make your alert volume really useful and not overburdening you and your teams and Q&A.
We’re really big on Q&A, so feel free to add your questions in the chat as well as the Q&A if you feel that that module fits you better. And again, yes, this will be recorded.
And just to level set, these are the people that whenever you need help from AFS, you you have the benefit of speaking with these amazing support experts. We have Ian, we have Donnie, we have Dan and Christelle. So regardless of who you’re working with, you are in good hands. This is.
I can confidently say this is the best support team I’ve ever worked with. So what’s ahead? So I’m going to hand it over to Ian, but this is just A. little bit of what’s ahead behind the scenes, where to find alert optimization, library reports and tips to simplify.
So Ian, I’m going to let you go ahead and take my screen and you guys get into the good stuff.

Ian Hamilton 4:30
Sounds good. Thank you, Brynn. Just confirming you all can hear me OK.
Perfect. So thank you for that introduction and nice to see everybody here again. And for any newcomers, welcome. I wanted to start before I jumped too far into anything, just with A. point of reference here. So as you may have been notified in this webinar invite here, we’ve made some changes.
Changes to our scoring algorithm on the true check system that we’re hoping will help alleviate some of the less helpful alerts that we’re hearing feedback on on the front line here. And so I wanted to start with kind of what things we’re doing up until now and and then move into kind of what has has changed here.
Stop.
Some of you who have done training before may have seen this information or people who use our help center may see this before, but this is just one of the many infographics we use to kind of highlight what True Checks is doing for you all. Basically, True Checks is operating by providing you with an overall recommendation and then the list of alerts.
And reasons for that recommendation. So up until now, this was pretty key. This particular information was pretty key to determine like why an overall recommendation occurred. You’ll see various alert types are associated with different recommendations, some of the less severe stuff, things like refer to image.
Maker correspond with A. hold recommendation compared to something like A. closed account, which might be A. deny recommendation. Up to this point and this change that we’ve made, we were really defining the overall recommendation exclusively by the negative history that was showing up on the account if we saw A. hold alert, even if it was.
3-4 or five years old, that would still sorry if we had like A. A. refer to maker for example on the hold level that was that old. It would still be presenting this hold recommendation even if we hadn’t seen anything in the meantime, just kind of erring on the side of caution with this new change and I can kind of switch to this search portal here now.
Some of you may use this, some of you may use it on A. more integrated level, but this is the vanilla search engine. If you’re not familiar, what we’ve done now, and I’ll just go ahead and search this check information that I have here, is we’ve altered the algorithm A. bit to take into account more of a.
Positive look at an account’s history, basically trying to determine if the recent or the most recent return and other alert information we’ve received is still as relevant as it would have been. And So what you might see going forward is something like what I have on my screen here. So up at the top.
This is where the recommendation is going to be. We actually see that this is giving us – no recommendation, which is, you know, what we’ve made changes to. But going down into the results, we see that there is actually A. fraud risk alert presence the.
Main alert on this account in this case looks to be like A. refer to maker and expanding the history here, we’ll see that there’s still an additional 99 alerts that we can go through and review counterfeits, more refer to makers and so on. But you’ll notice that below that there’s this overall recommendation reason here that is explained.
Explaining that the account history shows consistent positive activity and that’s the key change that that we’ve made here. So I’m looking at A. combination of factors, notably things like again how recent the return information was, the overall query volume and things of that nature. We’re trying to get A. bigger picture look at the account history.
And rather than just saying that there’s A. negative response and giving you that negative recommendation, we’re trying to be A. little bit more intelligent about how we look at the history overall. And so with that, we’re able to give you this consistent positive activity response that now corresponds with this no recommendation message and the ultimate.
The goal here again is to reduce the amount of unhelpful recommendations that you’re receiving. You’ll still get that alert history. We’re not going to get rid of it. It’ll still be present in the reporting and all of that fun stuff as well. But now what your end users can expect to see is this recommendation here basically saying, hey, there’s some alerts on this, but based on our recent history and.
And other factors, it looks like there’s some consistent positive activity. We’re going to give you no recommendation. And so for an integrated setup, just because I’m sure that’s A. question many of you integrated users would be using on your various telecapture systems and such.
How does this manifest there? Well, the ideal case scenario is that the partner is using this overall recommendation reason and so we would expect you to see no recommendation and then this message saying that there’s A. consistent positive activity.
If you ever see that that’s not the case, that’s something you can definitely let us – and the integrated partner know. We definitely want to make sure the messaging is clear there, so I thought I’d highlight that. That’s our expectation. But in the case that you see anything different, we’re definitely interested in knowing.
One thing to note here too, is that our system is never going to. One thing is that our system is never going to provide you with A. positive assertion. We’re never going to recommend that you accept A. A. check bill. That has not changed there.
The primary reason for that is because we don’t know still if the check that you’re looking at is in fact going to be A. good check or not. We still are just working with the the history that’s being provided to us. So with that information you can expect to see A. lot more no recommendation messages.
Messages for cases like this where we have that positive history. So that’s the key change here. With all of that being said, one thing we want to kind of transition to talking to about again is the topic of alert optimizations and kind of the implications of this.
On those settings. So again, many of you may be familiar with these now. For anybody new to this, to get to the optimization settings on the web portal, you’ll navigate to Administration, Client, and then you’ll go to Alert Optimization here and you’ll actually see the list of your current.
Certainly enabled settings. You may have something in here already, you may not. Either way is totally OK, but what I’m looking at next here is our suggestion library here. So we’re not going to focus on too much of how to make an optimization in this webinar today. You can find that information still on our previous two webinars and.
Our team will talk a little bit more about meeting to to review this as well, but the suggestions library here is something that we’ve been maintaining. We’re trying to make sure we take this feedback, even in addition to the changes made to our algorithm. As far as positive scoring goes, we want to make sure that we’re still taking that feedback and giving you some.
Place to start in case you have no idea where to begin, but need to quickly make some changes to improve your experiences. So we previously talked about these time frame settings. For example, here you’ll see that we’ve added some new, more aggressive profiles here for institutions who are still experiencing.
Too many alerts. You can definitely try these out to to see if that has a better impact on on the data that you’re getting. But as the positive scoring pertains to this, I wanted to talk a little bit more in depth about the common allow list. Again, this is something that we recently started doing again taking that feedback similar.
To how the positive scoring has changed, I’m trying to get some feedback from institutions from the data that we have to see which accounts are flagging with alerts where maybe they have a much lower risk than we might initially think. And we’re compiling these accounts into this setting here, so you can always go into the.
Library.
To pull this as well. If you’re finding that the algorithmic changes aren’t having as much of an immediate impact, this will have another set of accounts where you can deliberately allow them under the system, and that’ll just present you with a message indicating that it has no recommendation and that it is on your institution’s allow list and any of you who have used this.
Previously or have similar settings in place. None of that is changing. We’re not getting rid of any of that. This is just kind of supplemental on top of that because as I’m sure all of you are aware of, every financial institution is different, different user bases, different geographical situations, different risk tolerance policies. And so these settings are still very.
Much important to tailoring the system to your to your needs there. And one thing I wanted to highlight just to kind of close up the conversation here is if you weren’t aware, anytime you create an optimization you can actually see the potential impact on your searches within a 30 day time frame.
For regular.
Alert optimization. You could do this by just getting to the last page. There’s 3 pages on the settings and that’ll be there. But for the public ones that we have shared on this library here, you can actually click on the little eye icon next to the plus button here. I’m going to do this for the allow list for example, and this is going to show you.
Again, what all of the query criteria and the alerts being suppressed are, but down here at the bottom is the feature that I’m talking about. This 30 day look back is going to check to see within your last 30 days of searching what alerts if any would be impacted by the setting that you’re creating here and so we can see for example I.
2.
Searches here that have accounts included on this allow list. We can see that the old recommendation here would have been a denied or an extended hold respectively for each of these. But with this new optimization in place we would get no recommendation back and so those are going to be the best ways for you to kind of gauge.
But the the reasoning is for for the responses, make sure that they’re getting optimized out if you want to be allowing these items to come through and so on and so forth. So that’s pretty much cover that pretty much covers a lot of the key impacts of this new change here. Again, we’re basically expecting that overall.
Volume of unhelpful works for those really common accounts, those much lower risk accounts to start going down significantly and our team is working on improvements to that algorithm constantly going forward too. So with that I will go ahead and.
Pass it back, I think, to Brynn.

Brynn Johnson 15:10
Yeah, I think I’m just gonna be letting you know some questions that came in. Dan did answer this one in chat, but in the chat we got somebody asking how do you get to the library?

Ian Hamilton 15:22
Oh great, I will. I will go back and and kind of start from scratch. So when you first sign into the web portal, assuming you have your client administrative permissions set, you’ll see this administration tab right here in the top right. You may have other tabs in between that depending on your set up, but you’ll click on administration.
You’ll navigate to client and then alert optimization right here and then this will take you to again your list. So these are what my account currently has enabled to get to the suggested library. There’s this view suggested button in the top right right next to where you create a new one.
Once you click that, you’ll be able to see all of the Uh optimization settings that we have curated from our side, so.

Brynn Johnson 16:07
Great. Thanks for that explanation. And and for those of you that aren’t watching the chat, I can just share some of the other questions. So another good question. So does the optimization work for those using the website and also on real time? And Dan answered that very well in the chat. But Ian, did you want to go ahead and just say for those?
Maybe those people that are on their phones are just really in listening only mode.

Ian Hamilton 16:30
Sure, yes, absolutely. So this is going to apply everywhere. Really the only difference is the interface that you’re seeing it on. But yes, if you’re using the web portal, if you’re using a more like real time telecapture type set up, even if you have more back office processes that are connected to this or using just Truechecks batch.
Directly. All of that’s going to be applied here. You’ll be able to make the settings to apply across those channels. And if you go back to some of the previous webinars too, you can even see if you want to apply settings only to one channel and not another. That is something we can do as well. So very flexible.

Brynn Johnson 17:08
Thanks Ian. And then another one I see in the chat, should everyone be able to access the library? I think that’s an access and permission question.

Ian Hamilton 17:15
Yep, I see Donnie just answered that one too. But like he said, if your role is the client administration role, you should be able to navigate to all of these pages here in the administration settings, including that Public Library.

Brynn Johnson 17:28
Great. And just to level set for everyone, should anybody have questions, we’ll talk about how to contact support, but just off people can e-mail support, correct? Or what do you think is the best way to to get in contact with you for these questions?

Ian Hamilton 17:44
Yeah, if you can send contacts to our support alias, which you can actually find very easily on the web portal as well. From any page on the portal you can navigate to help and support here. This will have not only our help center and some scheduling.
Options here for you if you want to schedule a meeting, but you’ll have our contact information down here at the bottom, which will include both our phone number and our e-mail address as well. That’ll create a ticket and help us track your issue as we review it with you.

Brynn Johnson 18:17
Great. That’s key. It’s you all do such a great job with support. So we want to make sure everybody knows how to work with you all and get in contact with you. So I’m going to continue to just work on these questions that we have in the chat since they’re there. So just another question about the recording. Yes, this is being recorded and I will send it to everybody.
Afterward and in a format that you can access online and then also in a format where you can forward it to people in your organization, because I know these trainings are really important for those of you attending, but also people that maybe didn’t get a chance to attend.
Yeah, I know it’s it’s great. We want to make sure that this is all very accessible. So should should we keep going through questions or do we want to hand it over and and keep the conversation going? I’ll let you all from support decide.

Ian Hamilton 19:06
If we want to tag off, I can switch to helping answer questions in the chat. I know we have some other frequently asked questions and and other topics that we do want to to make sure we get to. So if that works, I’m happy to to switch gears.

Brynn Johnson 19:21
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think we should talk through them live as well, but let’s pull up our next. Are you all able to see the?
The slide questions from our registrants.
Yes. OK. So these are just some things that we’ve had questions that we’ve had along the way. A big thing that it gets asked is, are we going to miss any alerts? What if we want to keep seeing all alerts? What would you say to that question?

Donold Arnold 19:53
Yeah, so I’ll take that one. Brynn, you will continue to see the alerts. The only thing that’s changing with this scoring change is that the the messaging around those alerts are is going to be changed. So like you saw with Ian’s example, you’re able to see the underlying alerts, you’re able to see.
The negative activity, we’re just now able to decide or or notice if there is consistent positive activity around an account as well.

Brynn Johnson 20:23
Great. That’s good to know. Question we’ve been hearing. So how do you know if an accounts activity is positive?

Donold Arnold 20:33
Yeah. So that one, it’s the same way that we know an accounts activity is negative. We can see the volume of all searches and this is across all channels. This is regardless of if the query is coming in via the portal, via via batch, via an integrated system. We see all of the activity and we know.
Based on just our robust and and to the to the second database, we know if an item is being returned or not and so we can see negative history as well as positive history.

Brynn Johnson 21:08
So for for me, my question is tell me, tell me about the benefit that’s giving me. You know these scoring updates are really important. So from support, I know that you it’s exciting for all of us to know these enhancements. So how how do you summarize that benefit that we’re we’re giving our true text customers?

Donold Arnold 21:26
I I think the biggest benefit is just accuracy of alerts. In the past it was very focused on negative activity and we are going to be also applying positive history as well, so and and positive activity.
And so it’s accuracy of alerts. I think the big benefit to the end user or to you all in the webinar here is going to be less manual intervention. And so while alert optimization is still going to be important.
There is going to be less that you will have to do in order to stay on top of these alert optimizations so that you can get accurate alerts without needing to go in and make changes. You know, like I see a lot of FIS doing once a month for example.
Um, you won’t have to stay on top of it as much.

Brynn Johnson 22:21
Well, we love to hear less manual effort. That’s a great thing to hear for all of us. I’m going to go ahead and pop over to additional questions that we might that we’ve been getting. So how again, I think that we maybe already covered this, but how does the scoring?
Reduce false positives.

Donold Arnold 22:41
Yeah. So it’s it’s like we said, we’re able to see accounts that have consistent positive activity and and we’ll still show the alerts underlying those those accounts and and then we’ll be able to show.
If there’s positive activity associated with those accounts as well.

Brynn Johnson 23:02
Got it. Question. Why do I have to optimize my alerts?

Donold Arnold 23:07
Yeah, this is probably the biggest one that I saw come in where a lot of people were asking like if if you’re showing now positive and negative activity on accounts, why are alert optimizations important? And I think that’s because every FI is completely different.
If you’ve had meetings with me, you’ve heard me say it before that your fraud that you’re experiencing, your risk tolerance, your member or customer activity is going to be different than even another Fi down the street. And so even though we can apply changes and and apply these.
These scoring modifications across the board, it’s still important to get some customized optimization for your institution, because what makes sense for you might not make sense for for another institution and vice versa.

Dan Burke 24:02
Hey, Brynn, Brynn, just an FYI, I think you’re on the presenter view because we can see your notes on the side of the screen there.

Brynn Johnson 24:02
Got it.
Yeah, I’m, I’m working on that little technical glitch, but we are not. So as a transparent company we our notes are are nothing to be afraid of. So we’re just we’re we’re happy to share behind the scenes which actually goes along with some of the questions we’re having which is.

Dan Burke 24:13
Sorry.
It’s true.

Brynn Johnson 24:27
Are these scoring changes active now? Where can we find more about what’s in the scoring? And and that’s a conversation we have around that, that we’re going to definitely be sharing information behind the scoring, right? We want to.
Within to make it not overwhelming, but we will be sharing information about what’s changed. We’ll definitely share the slide deck, but it’s helpful for us to hear too, like what your appetite is for not only what’s changing, but what is behind the changes, what’s the technology and the the algorithm driving that.
OK, I’m going to stop sharing my screen so I can make sure that the the right view is showing. But when I stop sharing or actually can somebody take over the view for me and do we want to do any more demoing or are we kind of at the point where we just wanted to go ahead and keep doing Q&A?

Dan Burke 25:21
I think we just wanted to show people how to schedule a meeting with us where the old webinars can be found. Ian already went over that a little bit, but I’ll just make sure everybody’s aware of it, so I’ll show you guys here.
So from literally any page in our portal, that’s portal.advancedfraudsolutions.com. Over here you see the help and support button. You click on that, it takes you to this page. Give it just a second and you’ll see this load. So this is where you can choose.
Any training that you’d like, any sort of meeting that you need. If you just need general training, you know there’s the Technical Support button there. If you’re having an urgent issue, you know we have our phone number over here. But for really anything else, you know, you just choose what you want here. Say I need some help with the alert optimization right there.
It’s going to tell you to pick somebody, so you can choose whichever one of us you like the most and pick that person, and then it’ll give you all of the available times that they have. Takes just a second to load up our calumly and then, yeah, it’ll show you everything available for you and then choose something that works for you and your team. We’ll make sure that.
That we can help you out and that call will be helpful for everyone. If you need to see the old webinars that we have, that’s under this Visit Help Center button here. So we’ve done a couple of these about alert optimizations and they’re going to be right up front for you as soon as you get to the help page. There’s these two webinars and either one of them.
Is going to be something you can watch it on demand. There’s a little bit more tutorial there. There’s the knowledge base that we have. And of course, you know this page here for the webinars on demand will be updated after this recording is available.
I think that’s all that we really wanted to demo Bren. If we want to go back to the Q&A, I think that would be great.

Ian Hamilton 27:18
You are muted Brynn really quick if the if you were talking to us.

Brynn Johnson 27:22
Yep. OK, so here’s the support center kind of slide again, where you can get support, the phone number, the e-mail which we just went over. But I just put a poll up to really get a sense for who is using alert optimization and who’s not and who’s unsure.
And the let’s see what the data is saying. So we have some a good amount of people that are unsure, which is an interesting stat. What do you support? What do you think that that conveys? Is it maybe just not an awareness? For those of you that are unsure, pop in the chat.
Is it that you don’t know where the optimizations are, or maybe that’s not your role to set up optimizations?

Donold Arnold 28:03
Yeah, I think it’s probably both. So if you go into the portal and you go to alert optimizations like Ian was showing admin and then client alert optimization, you’ll see if the optimizations exist. So oftentimes when I meet with Fi’s because this is a big focus of mine, you you I might only meet with one person.
And maybe I meet with them every month and I don’t meet the rest of you. But it’s also entirely possible that you don’t have any alert optimizations in place. And if you do, or if that’s the case and you don’t, you can e-mail support. You could also e-mail.
Me or I know Dan works on this a lot as well. You can e-mail me directly, you can e-mail Dan directly and we can set up some time to go over alert optimizations. I think it’s very important to get customized like I was saying before each of the FIS.
What makes sense for you is going to be different from institution to institution, so set up some time. It’s just a quick 30 minute meeting and we’ll run some performative analytics for you that’s customized for your institution and we can see.
What makes sense for your institution to get true checks really, really flowing the best that it can?

Brynn Johnson 29:21
Oh, a good question came in. Is there a resource that gives more information on each optimization?
What do you think guys?

Donold Arnold 29:34
Yeah, definitely. So in the help and support center that Dan was showing, we have articles about optimizations. We also have recorded trainings. Any of the previous webinars shows all of the features and those are recorded as well. So in that help and support center you can see.
All of the documentation we have on alert optimization or if you want to just hop on a call and and kind of talk through some things with us, we can do that as well. So you can schedule that the exact same way.

Brynn Johnson 30:05
Right. And I find this interesting. So for those that are unsure about their optimizations, whether they’re set up or not or not, we’re getting feedback that it’s not their role. So I I I find that if it’s if that’s not your role.
I would be curious, just moving forward, are these trainings still especially focused on alert optimization? Are these helpful or if it’s, what else would you like to learn beyond alert optimization from support and AFS training and and even the marketing department? That would be helpful for us to know.
I’m going to Scroll back to see if we missed any questions. I know there were some really good ones in the chat. So somebody asked is it best to apply all of the suggested suppression? So we got a good answer in the chat, but I would love to hear your kind of round, round table thoughts from support. Should you apply all of the suggested suppressions or optimizations or what are your what’s your standpoint on that?

Dan Burke 31:10
The suggested suppressions are going to be a good starting point, especially the the year, the yearly suppressions that we have in place. Suggestions, excuse me. So those are going to be a conservative starting point to help cut off a little bit of the data that you’re seeing so that you’re not getting those very old alerts.
So we strongly recommend at least starting with the the ones that you’ll see at the top of the view suggested view suggested page, which are the two year suppression for hold recommendations, three years for extended hold and five years for deny. We also strongly recommend the common allow list as Ian was saying with the scoring changes that’s.
It’s going to become less relevant as more of those accounts tend to be very strongly, very highly scored, and so they shouldn’t be showing up as much going forward, but it’s still a useful tool there.
So those are the the suggestion ones that we strongly suggest you add. I can only say suggest so many times in one sentence, but apart from those, you know, like Donnie was saying, we can schedule a call with you, go over our personalized recommendations and of course that’s all included with your subscription. So we’re happy to go over that with you and you know there’s.
People that Donnie and or myself meet with every month, every couple of months, every couple of weeks, and we’re happy to do whatever it is to to help you get these in place and make sure you’re using your account effectively.

Brynn Johnson 32:37
Got it. Um.

Donold Arnold 32:38
Dan Lauren here is asking if you can show the the library again the suggested 235 profile.

Dan Burke 32:45
Yeah, sure.
One second and I will ull it back U.

Brynn Johnson 32:54
And.
And while he’s doing that, we saw a lot of people that were fans of Catch Me If You Can in the poll. The most important part of this is what’s your favorite fraud movie? I picked 3, but did I miss any good fraud movies? I kind of like Wolf of Wall Street, but it’s a little it makes my.
Blood pressure rise.

Dan Burke 33:21
Mine too. So from the any page here you just go to the administration button and client then alert optimization and then the library is over here under this new suggested button on the right hand side.

Brynn Johnson 33:26
I.

Dan Burke 33:39
And that’s where you’ll see our suggestions. So these first three are the ones that I was talking about. This is the more conservative starting point because you’re suppressing not all that much data. I mean, of course AFS has 17 years worth of data, but as I’m sure everyone on the call is aware, fraud moves pretty quickly and so most of the recommendations.
That you’re getting do come from within the last few years. This is going to eliminate some of those older ones. These three down here, they’re going to be your more aggressive optimizations. You can see we’re only suppressing everything except for the last year of hold and extended hold, and then the last two years of deny recommendations.
None of these are set in stone. They are suggestions. If you look over here on the right hand side, you’ll see it’s literally just a number of days that’s filled into a field. So it doesn’t have to be exactly 2 years, three years, five years. We can change that to whatever you want it to be.
You can go more specific with certain optimizations. I’ve seen people who, you know, they might set their hold suppression at two years and then they’ll say for forgery returns, I don’t care about those unless they’re from within the last six months, that sort of thing. So you can certainly get a lot more granular than these overall.
Optimizations, but these are the very baseline that we would strongly suggest you put in place. Everyone should have some form of these and then you know, once we get past this, as Donnie was saying, it becomes more personalized to your institution and you know things are going to look different for everyone at that point.

Brynn Johnson 35:11
Oh, let’s put you on the spot. Can you show an example of setting an optimization?

Dan Burke 35:17
Sure thing, let’s do it. So under this create new button here, this takes you to the page where you’re setting up your search. This page here is saying telling the system what to search for, and so once the system finds whatever you put on this page, then we’ll be applying the optimizations to it on the next page.
So just for this example, let’s use a random number.
I have my Charles Schwab routing number memorized and then we’ll put a random account number in here. So what this is going to tell the system is whenever I search for a check with this routing number and this account number, we’re going to apply some sort of optimization to it. And that’s something that we’ll set up on the next page. There’s a lot more that we can get into here. You can say whenever I search for.
For anything at all, that’s this Apply to all queries button. If you’re only talking about searching for individual accounts, that’s this specific criteria button. I click Add and Save. That goes down here and this is where you can keep adding more routing and account numbers if you’d like. So if you have something that you’d like to apply the same optimization.
To multiple accounts, you keep popping those in here, keep clicking add and save, and then you’ll be able to do the same thing to all of those. There’s also these additional options over here. Check number would be if you know you know there are certain check numbers that have been compromised perhaps, and you don’t want to. You always want to block them. That’s really the most.
And use that I see for that one amount. You can also use that. So if I come back in here, say I want to edit this particular row, that’s where this little pencil icon comes in. Everything kind of fills back in up here. So I could say you know for this particular account I only want to be suppressing alerts for checks that are.
Let me change this less than, let’s say $5000. So this is telling the system when I search for a check, this routing number, this account number, and the check is less than $5000, we’re going to apply an optimization to that.
I.
So on this next page, and Brynn, please interrupt me if there are any other questions about what we’re doing here. This is where you set the actual the suppression that you want. So there’s always return a recommendation of none, meaning you’re saying I know this account is good, I don’t ever want to see alerts for it, period. Add it to my allow list.
There’s always return a recommendation of deny, meaning I know this account is bad. I always want to see a deny no matter what alerts there are for it. Add it to my block list. Essentially, if you fall somewhere in between there, that’s where the specific suppression criteria come in.
And for I saw a couple of familiar names on here on the the participant list. So some of you’ve heard me say this before, but whatever you type on this page, whatever you click on this page, you’re telling the system to ignore that. You’re saying I don’t care about X where X is whatever you’re clicking or whatever you’re typing.
So most of the time I tell people to click all of these different alert types. That’s really just about where the alert itself is coming from. When you’re talking about making an optimization because you aren’t interested in seeing certain alerts, usually you’re going to be using all of these because you don’t care where the alert is coming from. You’re saying I know that it’s good, or I know that it’s.
It’s bad because of something. Of course, this is something that we can get more into detail on on one of the personalized calls. For the sake of this webinar, we’ll just say, you know, for now, let’s click all of those. That’s the only requirement on this page is that you check one of these boxes.
Usually you will also be wanting to check one of these up here or start checking some boxes down here. So again, remembering that whatever I click or whatever I type, I’m saying don’t show this to me. So if I say don’t show me extended hold recommendations, don’t show me hold recommendations, but keep showing me the deny recommendations.
That would be helpful for you if you still want to see things like duplicate queries. If you’re pretty sure this account is good overall, but you still want to watch out for those more most severe alerts like closed accounts, item can’t be represented, those sorts of things. Those are all going to be deny recommendations.
So by suppressing just the extended hold and the hold, you’re getting rid of some of that stuff that you might consider noise while still being rotected against the the most severe recommendations that we have.
There’s also this older than days, which is also very useful. So you could say things like, you know, I don’t care about hold recommendations if they’re older than 15 days, right? I only want to see something that has happened within the last two weeks. If it’s older than that, forget about it. It’s not interesting to me. Get it out of here.
And then as I was kind of saying earlier, you can also be very granular with how you want to suppress things. And that’s what all of these boxes for all of these boxes down here are for. So you know, maybe you don’t care for this account, you know, you don’t care about lottery winner, you don’t care about secret shopper, you’re not interested in overpayment or work from home, but you still.
Want to see if we have any other alerts for it? That’s certainly something that you can do by selecting these individual alert types down. Sorry, alert reasons down here. This can be a little bit like playing a game of whack A mole. If you’re talking about a large well known account, it might have.
Two dozen different return reasons behind it. So you might, you know, you might suppress these four and then the next day you get another. You search for that check again and you think, well, I’m not going to see anything, but there’s actually still, you know, a counterfeit alteration alert on that check or or on that account or there’s a, you know, refer to maker and you didn’t suppress that. So you’re going to.
Press that so you’re going to see that one instead. Our system is always going to show you the most severe alert that we have. And so if you’re doing these individual check boxes, you know, especially if it’s an account that’s like a bill pay account or something like that, then you might be, you know.
Kind of spinning your wheels sometimes, trying to find the individual reasons for it. That’s why you know I recommend these boxes down here. If there’s something very specific with an account that you don’t want to see, like for example a bill pay account, you might not want to see the counterfeit alteration because you know those are always going to be showing up, but you want to be aware.
Of anything else that might be happening. So for the sake of argument here, we’re going to say extended hold and hold are the things I’m not interested in on the last page here. This is where it takes you to put a name for your optimization. You know, name it whatever you want. It’s going to be visible only in the system. It’s not going to show.
Show to your tellers or anyone else reviewing checks. The notes also will only show when you’re on the alert optimization page. All of this is logged, so no matter who’s doing it, no matter what notes you put in there, the person who’s logged in right now, their e-mail address will be associated with this change. So if there ever is any question about.
Why something happened? You’ll be able to use the audit log on the main alert optimization page to see exactly what that is. As Ian was mentioning before, you know you can split things up by different channels. You can even choose to apply optimizations only to certain API keys. So if you have multiple API integrations.
With us, as some of you do, then you might want to say, I don’t want to see, I only want to suppress this alert when it’s coming from this partner. I don’t want to see, I don’t want to suppress anything when it’s coming from my ATM deposits, that sort of thing, if that’s a different integration. So those are the sorts of things that you can set up.
Up there. Again, we’re more than happy to talk about that in more detail. And then this gives you a summary down here. So this query criteria is saying what am I searching for? I’m searching for this routing number, this account number, anything less than this dollar amount.
And then when I find that, what am I suppressing? Well, I’m suppressing extended holds. I’m suppressing holds from any of these sources. And then this 30 day look back, as Ian mentioned, this is going to give you a real time look at your last 30 days worth of searches. I’m in the training environment and I have a fake account number, so it’s not going to show me anything.
But this is a very cool feature because it’s not a hypothetical, it’s your actual data, your real searches, and it will show you how those would have been affected by this suppression had it been in place when you were looking for those checks. So it’s a really good way to do a double check and make sure that you’re doing something worthwhile if you’re trying to affect the broad.
Mod.
Number of queries at once, like say you know this account that you search 50 times a week, you’re trying to suppress that. If you come down here and you only see one or two rows, well then you know that you’ve done something that’s not quite right, because if you’re searching that 200 times a month, I would expect to see a lot of pages down here that are.
By this change that you’re making. So you might have made your criteria too narrow. You might not have suppressed enough from on the last page, but of course, you know, we’re happy to go over this with you. You know, I look over people’s shoulders while they share their screen and put things in place all the time. So whatever way, whatever help you need from us, we’re more than happy.
Happy to provide that. Is that the longest answer ever to that question, Brynn?

Brynn Johnson 44:23
That’s great. Oh, no, no. I thought that was really great. I learned more. I mean, I get, I become even more of an expert every time you guys do this. But that was that was really helpful for me. We have somebody raise their hand with a question.
Shauna, please drop it in the chat. I think that’s the best way. Unless you can’t, I could unmute you. I’ll allow your mic just for a second, Shauna.
Maybe that’s not working. Why don’t you just drop it in the chat and then so Shauna, we’ll make sure your question gets answered whether on this in this chat or we’ll reach out to you. Bridget asked, are the positive alert recommendations live now? Should we be seeing them? That’s a good question. Are they just like?
In the product, making it awesome all the time? Or is that something separate we see?

Dan Burke 45:18
No, they’re there now. You will see them on occasional searches. As I understand it, it may be presented differently in the different integrators that we have. So you might not see the exact language that we’re talking about, but we are showing those positive recommendations now to on any search that it applies to.
Ian or Donnie, I don’t know if you guys want to add anything on top of that.

Ian Hamilton 45:42
I would just add that like I mentioned earlier, the changes that we’ve made are just kind of the starting point. So it may not be nearly as obvious in the beginning, but these are things that we will be improving over time. And so the the goal is to slowly roll out these adjustments to make sure.
To make sure we don’t overcorrect, for example, because we do tend to err on the side of caution. So I would just keep an eye out for that in the reporting and and with your end users experience is what I would say.
And of course, let us know if you have feedback.

Brynn Johnson 46:15
Um, I have a.
I have a question. So if I’m an FI that’s brand new to this thinking we need to get, we need to start doing alert optimizations, do you recommend that they go straight to suggested to the library or should they start with custom first?

Dan Burke 46:34
They should absolutely start with the suggested. If they have accounts that they already are considering very low risk on their side, you could start setting those up for your allow list or start suppressing alerts for them. You know, I see a lot of things like the local hospital in your community has a payroll account and everybody from that hospitals to.
Depositing their checks with you. So you see those checks 100 times a week and you know because of that high volume, the account is always going to have some sort of return on it at some point, right? Some there’s a counterfeit check, there’s a refer to maker, something like that. So you know that that account is always going to show up with a recommendation, but you also know.
Know enough about that to consider it very low risk. And so you want to start suppressing that. You can absolutely do that when you’re brand new. You know, we can start working with you before we even have any data, you know, just to get these suggested ones in place and then to talk in general, you know, to try to draw those things out of you to about other accounts that you might consider low risk.
That you want to suppress or accounts that you consider very high risk and you always want to have deny recommendations for them. So those are absolutely things you can set up right out of the gate as we get more data on you, as we see more searches coming in for you. Yes, we can make better, more personalized recommendations, but there’s no reason that we can’t get those things going for you right away.
And no, there are no additional fees for any of this. Alice, the nothing that we’re talking about here is anything extra period.

Brynn Johnson 48:04
So I put something in the chat because I’m really curious what level of information people are interested in in terms of the scoring update and we really strive to be as transparent and and clear as possible for but for the positive scoring update.
I’m, I’m curious what level people are interested in receiving, you know, the high level, the medium in-depth as possible that will help us as well. Just kind of, OK, so I got some people that want to know as in-depth as possible, 84 percent, 85%.
And that’s good information for us. Of course we’re gonna get, we’re gonna give as much as as we can and we understand that that helps you. So we’ll we’ll work on that and make sure that the we we certainly communicate these updates, but I want to gauge.
Um, what level you want so.
Uh, somebody just asked, are more FIS entering their returns into the system?

Dan Burke 49:06
I’m not sure what more means in this case, but we have many thousands of FIS and partners and other institutions we work with that contribute their return data to us.
So every day we work on getting more, I guess. How’s that for an answer?

Brynn Johnson 49:30
Right.
And then I’ll this will be maybe my final question. I ask you all support team.
You know, doing these optimizations takes time. So tell me why I would go in and and set up some optimizations and and what I’m going to get out of, you know, spending a little bit of time getting in there, setting up optimizations, what I’m going to get out of that and the benefit of tuning these really for your FI.

Donold Arnold 50:00
I think the biggest thing for me is, is finding a balance between, you know, not not getting too many alerts, but getting the ones that are just right for you. You know, finding the alerts that are, you know, like Goldilocks was looking for.
That’s really going to help because if you get too many alerts, that is, it’s sort of a poor member experience and and a poor user experience, but you’re going to mask maximize your your risk version.
Or or you’re you’re going to decrease your risk as much as possible. If you want to increase rather that member experience and that user experience, then you’re going to open yourselves up for a lot of risk. And so that’s I think that is at a high level the best reason to do this.
It’s going to make it so that you’re not getting too many alerts, but you’re getting the alerts that are just right.

Dan Burke 50:59
You can really help reduce the workload on your team. The the most important thing from my perspective is that the more noise that your team sees, the more things that might be considered false positives, the less attention they’re going to pay to the real alerts that are coming through so.
If you’re seeing these accounts that you know are good, that your team sees 500 times a month, but they’re still alerting, then it just becomes one more thing that they have to click through in order to help their member get their money. And nobody wants to deal with that, which I don’t blame them. They know that this account is good. They don’t want to have to see this every time. So we do things like suppress those alerts and then.
And when they see a real alert that comes through that’s more relevant that says, you know, you should deny this check because we’ve seen closed account alerts on this particular account in the past, they’re more likely to pay a little bit more attention to that and hopefully help save you from, you know, those sorts of losses, so.
You know, any system like this is going to have noise, but the more that we can do to eliminate that for you, the better it’s going to be for, like Donnie was saying, your your member experience, your user experience and everyone’s experience.

Brynn Johnson 52:08
Yeah, that’s a great answer. Ian, did you want to add anything to that around, you know, benefits or I think you all covered it really well the of the benefits, you know.

Ian Hamilton 52:16
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just the kind of going back to where we started here with the with the scoring algorithm, right. Our system, you know, is constantly improving. We’re constantly trying to find ways to be proactive about this. But the reality is, is that every institution is different and we don’t want to kind of like Donny was saying, we don’t want to.
Overcorrect on your behalf and then suddenly see you start to experience fraud where you otherwise would have caught it. We tend to err on the side of caution here in the fraud mitigation space. And so while we can make changes and we’re constantly going to be trying to improve the base experience, the reality is, is that you’ll.
We wanna be able to customize things using the data and analytics that we get, comparing your returns to the alerts that you’re getting, and making sure that you as an institution are getting the most out of the system with all of the information we have to offer. So we are kind of attacking that from both ends to help improve the experience.
As much as we can, so.

Brynn Johnson 53:18
Great. While you were talking, we got another question more tactical. What would be a reason Truechecks shows no recommendation refer to your normal check cashing?

Ian Hamilton 53:29
Yes. So based on the the scenario that that Ikram was explaining here, I’ll just quickly touch on that at a high level. So it sounds like you’re, you know that the accounts is closed or you learn from the other Fi that the accounts closed due to fraud, but our system is saying no recommendation what that comes down to.
It was just the information that’s been communicated to our system. We say it all the time in training, but Truechex doesn’t unfortunately have a 100% full picture of the, you know, landscape across fraud, right? We get a ton of return information, like Dan was saying. We’re constantly looking for more D.
Details like those account status data points that you’re mentioning, but we may not know that that account is closed unless an institution reports it to us. And so until that alert is in our system, Truecheck is kind of blind to those scenarios and that really applies to every sort of fraud type that you could see.
For A. closed account where we maybe have an alert on our system, but you still get no recommendation, that would be either because your settings have suppressed the alerts for either that account or that particular fraud type or in line with this scoring algorithm. Again, we’re basing our information off of reports.
That we’ve received depending on the nature of that report, when we got it, how frequent it is. This new scoring improvement to our our algorithm may deprioritize the significance of alerts like that over time. So if it’s an old report, we may just.
It may just be that we haven’t received any new information recently. It’s kind of what that boils down to. I I hope that help answers your question, Ikram. Let us – know if you need to review that any further.

Brynn Johnson 55:15
Awesome. Well, I think there’s lots more to talk about always as we discuss.
Well, we got one more. We can squeeze in one more. OK, Lauren, thanks for all your questions and participation. So she said optimization question. Remind me on the 30 day look back if that information information is what we would have seen with the setting or what we would not have been seen.

Dan Burke 55:43
It’s telling you what the recommendation would have changed to have the optimization that you’re putting in place right now been in place at the time of the search. So yesterday I searched for check 1234. It gave a recommendation of hold.
The optimization that you’re setting up right now says I don’t want to see hold recommendations for account 1234. So that 30 day look back is going to say old recommendation hold new recommendation none. So it’s essentially a a what if this was in place at the time of the search? What would you have seen instead?

Brynn Johnson 56:21
Yeah, I love that feature. It’s very powerful. It helps you really be informed when you’re doing this work.

Donold Arnold 56:26
And I I think most notably with that 30 day look back, if you are giving us your return files, we will be able to see are there any returned items, so items that we know to be fraudulent that would have potentially been suppressed or affected in any way.
Had you built the optimization that you’re thinking about creating or looking at? So another reason for us to to get your return files, it’s going to really help you determine before the fact. Are you being maybe a little too aggressive with your alert optimization?
So it not only can we help increase the accuracy once we get your returns, but we can also create better alert optimizations once we have that file as well.

Brynn Johnson 57:15
Got it and.

Donold Arnold 57:16
And if you have any questions about getting that file to us, if you think that we’re not getting it, you can e-mail us at support and we can get that process going.

Brynn Johnson 57:25
Yeah. And I have that up on the screen again, just how to get in contact with our support team. As you can tell, they live and breathe this and you’re going to get all the help you need by reaching out. But we really hope, you know, our goal is to make these webinars really actionable. So we we thank you for all of your participation today.
And we’re just going to continue to share this information and and also we’ll we may branch out as well. Alert optimization is key, but knowing that there’s other roles on this meeting, feel free to let us know what you would want to learn about as well beyond alert optimization, so.
With that, we will go ahead and let you all get on with the rest of your day, but we can’t thank you enough and we look forward to seeing you in the next True Checks webinar and training. Thanks all.