Allen Love has the broad experience necessary to lead this tough battle
TD Bank's Allen Love was certain about his career direction while attending the University of New Haven for a master's in public administration. But when a professor recommended he should consider a career at the Treasury Department, it changed his professional life forever.
"I started training to be a Special Agent, Love said. "When I went through the specialized training for financial crimes, I took to it right away."
That decision was the start of a long career in financial crimes and fraud and risk management that started with the Treasury Department and then spanned to consulting jobs and major roles in the private sector. TD is now reaping the rewards of his wide-ranging and in-depth experience in the newly created role as Head Fraud Risk Management (FRM) & Global Security Investigations (GSI).
Love's new role is to lead the two teams of over 220 colleagues critical to ensuring the bank's success in the battle against financial fraud - one responsible with oversight of the fraud risk management framework and the other with actual implementations of security measures.
New Fraud Risk Management team created to meet today's challenges
The new Fraud Risk Management team has global oversite as a second line of defense to the current teams that work with each business. Love is focused on ensuring the best fraud risk management control and governance structures are being applied across the Bank. It will set the standards to implement controls to combat fraud to provide TD customers with greater certainty that their transactions are safe and secure.
"The times have changed as new products are coming out," Love said. "Criminals are not just attacking banks from the common way of walking in and robbing a bank, but through cyber capabilities. With the different ways to try to commit fraud, this new team is an enhancement to controls we have already established."
Most members of this new team have deep corporate experience in this area, which will be needed to find success with all the challenges. The team must be both disruptors in questioning how fraud risk is currently managed and creating a new framework, which may create significant changes. They also need to be diplomats, ensuring they can establish the close relationships required for the best results.
Global Security Investigations team has vital role
The GSI team has the responsibility for all investigations regarding physical assets, robberies, fraud and internal investigations. Beyond that, the team manages threats, which include a wide range of activities from protests, severe weather occurrences, such as hurricanes, and providing updates related to safety and security, including travel advisories.
Members of the team include colleagues who have worked in the law enforcement, risk management, fraud operations and the legal profession.
Fraud has potential to impact everyone
Love's extensive experience included a role at PayPal more than a decade ago, which gave him particularly good insights into the types of fraud in the online marketplace that he has built upon to inform his decisions today.
"There are differences from back then, people are online more today and more connected via their mobile phones and via social media sites," he explained. "But fraud is fraud, today it is just carried out over multiple channels."
He noted that millennials and younger generations tend to be more trusting of using online tools to conduct business, so they may be more susceptible in that area compared with older generations. But the older generations are more likely to be impacted by fraud conducted through robocalls and other more traditional ways.
"But again, with the account takeover, identity theft and people being able to access information, whether it's via the phone, via online or just other social engineering, I think everyone can potentially be impacted," he said.
Education is an important key for prevention
The best weapon in the fight for prevention is education. Love notes that banks who are fierce rivals in every other way, meet regularly with both federal and local regulators to learn about new threats and prevention methods.
Education is also going to play a more visible role at TD for both employees and customers. Currently, Love's team is planning to work with other stakeholders and hold sessions to create content, available online and in-person at Store locations that will provide information to both audiences to more fully inform them about how to avoid fraud and ways to identify it. "Too often it happens once there's a big breach, then you'll hear all the news reports, and everybody will say, 'remember to protect your personal information,' " he explained. "I am saying why can't we do that more frequently?" To make the public more often aware would be beneficial and that is what we will be doing."
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