Digital banking app Tandem has launched its latest feature: the ‘Fraud Conversation’. The tool highlights potentially fraudulent activity in a user’s account through chatbot interaction.
Tandem sees its solution as ‘natural and unintrusive’ versus traditional bank responses to potential fraud, such as card blocking and unsolicited calls. The tool was initially dreamt up by the bank’s 11,000 co-founders – early users of the app.
“When we talked to our co-founders about sources of unnecessary stress the way overseas fraud checks are handled came up time and time again. We want to make fraud prevention easy for people: we give users a nudge and if they confirm that it’s them conducting the activity they can continue spending hassle-free,” said Paul Clark,Tandem’s CTO, in a statement.
Tandem says that overseas spending is just one of many potentially fraudulent activities now monitored by the app. The bank already has a ‘Highlights’ feature which draws attention to large payments, new merchants and unnecessary fees; the ‘Fraud Conversation’ is meant to make monitoring spending on the bank’s credit card similarly intuitive.
Tandem launched its first product, a credit card, in February of this year, shortly after completing the acquisition of Harrods Bank. It followed that up with the launch of its fixed savings accounts in April. It bills itself as ‘the good bank’.
A key tenet of the digital/neo banking code is to help reduce financial stress. Last week, for example, we saw Monzo go live with a feature that allows users to block all transactions related to gambling, in connection with Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK.
“Tandem’s goal has always been to make customers ‘life-rich’,” continued Tandem’s Clark. “This is why we’ve developed a new feature that allows people to easily identify instances of fraud and to spend overseas hassle free. While many banks employ these fraud rules, most do not offer a self resolution service, and certainly not a proactive one.”
