Mitigating Fraud with Social Media Data

It’s possible for financial institutions (FIs) to cross reference information provided on loan or credit card applications with social media data to flag for disparities. 

But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s viable. Manually verifying an applicant’s: profession, employer, tenure, education status, and other pertinent attributes, takes far too much time. 

Enterprises that receive thousands of applications every day simply cannot afford the resources required to manually validate an applicant’s provided information against social media data. The viability of social media data as a corroborative tool demands automation.

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

The Demyst platform provides access to thousands of data products through a single API. In addition to crafting personalized solutions, Demyst also provides plug-and-play API recipes that combine data from multiple sources.  

Many these sources provide mutually exclusive attributes. For example: PIPL returns pertinent information like age, education level, online usernames, and social media urls; while People Data Labs provides industry, salary, and years of experience; and Full Contact delivers demographics, affinities, and lifestyle attributes.

While data from each provider is uniquely valuable, leveraging the data from all three sources allows for deeper insights via the analysis of a more robust dataset. To that end, Demyst combined the attributes from the three sources listed above in the recipe for Social Media Validation for US KYC and Marketing. This API recipe identifies and flags any disparities between an applicant’s social media data and their self provided information. 

Due Diligence Next Steps

Verifying application information by checking against social media data is a basic step in the due diligence process. From there, organizations can utilize more of Demyst’s plug-and-play APIs to determine the validity of an applicant’s email address and or verify their phone number. They may also wish to determine whether said applicant is on any anti-money-laundering (AML) watchlists. There are an abundance of APIs in the Demyst toolbox that can be used to mitigate fraud.  

Sign up for a free Demyst Account and discover the benefits of integrating data from multiple sources through a single API.