Amanda Shute is a crime fighter. And while she doesn’t wear a cape, Shute can be seen wearing a crown on occasion.
Two years ago, the TD Bank fraud and financial crimes professional was named Mrs. Maine America – a pageant that celebrates women who are leaders in their community – for her passion in helping to make online experiences safer for kids and their parents, as well as her dedication to uncovering and preventing fraud.
“I never had any interest in pageants until I was an adult,” Shute said. “There’s more depth to the experience than people might perceive.”
To Shute, there's power to the platform. She said that being on stage is a way to be able to advocate for fraud and cyber awareness and reach an audience of kids who look up to her. Offstage, she takes the time to help educate families on online safety through creating and sharing infographics and resources for parents to have conversations with their children.
“My message to children has always been to create awareness about their digital footprint,” Shute said.
“Kids don’t always realize that what they share online can put their privacy and safety at risk. Helping children recognize these impacts while empowering parents with information to build digital safety as a family is a mission I’m passionate about and one that drives my work every day.”
When she isn’t counselling people on how to help avoid online hazards, Shute devotes herself to uncovering fraudulent schemes to help protect the Bank and its customers. Shute has been combatting criminals for more than 13 years at various financial institutions and companies across North America.
Keeping clients safe
In her current role, Shute pulls together information and insights from key departments across TD Bank, interpreting and analyzing the data. She then translates it all into technical language that TD Bank’s software engineers, architects, and developers can use as a blueprint to build highly sophisticated fraud detection systems.
“We look for anomalies in patterns of behaviour that might raise an alarm,” Shute said.
“You want to identify a motive. You always ask yourself: ‘Did this person actually submit this application to TD Bank? Or did someone else try to do it to get money? Why would this person do it?’ Our work is rooted in understanding human behaviour and managing the risk it creates to keep people and systems secure.”
As a Chief Product Owner, Financial Crimes Detection at TD Bank, Shute is charged with developing systems to help protect the Bank and its clients from the world’s most sophisticated criminals.
For the past three years, Shute has contributed to the Bank’s fight to combat fraudsters. Her current project is focused on building a complex technological solution to help identify threats against the Bank.
“I am a bridge between business and technology,” Shute said. “I take what the business is looking for and translate it in a way the technology team understands.”
This work is important to Shute because she genuinely cares about making a difference in her community through building fraud awareness and cyber literacy. You can often find her visiting little free libraries around Maine to distribute children’s books about online safety.
"What motivates me is being able to help protect people by equipping them with the information they need to take that one extra step to stop and think before they click,” Shute said.
Developing her skills
The journey to where she is today started on the frontlines.
After Shute graduated from high school in Massachusetts, she walked into a local TD Bank branch and applied for a job as a teller. She went on to pursue a degree in criminal justice at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
“I always go back to my experience of being on the frontline at the Bank,” Shute said. “Those moments always stick with me and really anchor me as far as what I do.”
Shute’s experience and criminal justice degree led to her first job as a fraud analyst at a credit union in New England, where she handled increasingly complex cases and was promoted to more senior roles.
Then, about eight years ago, Shute left the banking world and joined an international fintech that specializes in payment processing. It was during her time there that Shute honed her technological skills, rising to become the company’s manager of global fraud and financial crimes operations while studying for a master’s degree in informatics at Northeastern University.
“I decided to study informatics because I really wanted to understand the movement of data,” Shute said. “It’s not just about stopping one fraud instance. It’s about understanding the whole landscape of organized crime and following the data.”
After helping to build the company's global fraud program, Shute wanted to do more. This led her back to TD Bank, but this time as a key player in TD Bank’s fraud modernization initiatives.
Shute’s impact is already being felt at the Bank. While the project will change, the mission will remain the same: helping safeguard TD Bank clients and community members.
“It’s not just stopping the criminal; it’s about getting to the root of it. It’s about prevention, that is our best defence,” Shute said. “It always comes back to protecting people.”
It is what crime fighters do, after all.
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