Newton is a fast-growing crypto exchange that serves hundreds of thousands of Canadians on its platform. Focused on retail investors and newcomers alike, Newton simplifies the process of buying and selling crypto assets — all at a low cost.
Problem: Newton’s fraud team relied on manual handoffs with its customer experience team for flagged cases
As a crypto exchange, Newton knew it had to comply with various Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations when onboarding users.
Simultaneously, Newton had been seeing an increasing number of signups, thanks to surging crypto trading, and wanted to ensure it could detect identity fraud both during users’ initial onboarding and reverification attempts.
Before Persona, Newton relied on a manual KYC process, where users would submit their ID via email and the fraud team had to review every item of possible interest for flagged accounts. Because the process was manual, bottlenecks could form at many different points in the process as communication happened both internally and with customers. Teams often had to review past customer information across multiple systems or scrutinize selfies and IDs by hand to determine if a customer was a bad actor, leading to inefficiency and slower results for end users.
Solution: Persona Cases ensures seamless collaboration between Newton’s customer experience and fraud teams by providing a single investigation center for suspicious cases.
Knowing its manual review process wasn’t sustainable, Newton partnered with Persona for the following reasons:
Streamlined onboarding and investigation process
Newton prides itself on a fast turnaround time for fraud investigations, which typically happen within one day. This feat doesn’t just happen by chance, though — it requires a lot of communication and smart use of tools. For instance, if Newton notices patterns amongst its user base with respect to fraud, it can identify those patterns and automate decisions based on those patterns using Persona’s Lists feature.
When Newton's customer experience team pinpoints an issue within a Zendesk ticket that’s deemed remotely suspicious, it can quickly trigger the creation of a case and tag it so the fraud team knows where to begin its investigation. As Jacob, Newton’s customer success manager puts it, “When there’s a suspicious case, we can just send a Cases link and it has all the information previously collected by Persona in a single place. That makes it easy for anyone to report suspicious activity to the fraud team without worrying about miscommunication.”
Ability to automatically decline bad actors while removing human biases
Because Persona powers both the verification and investigation efforts at Newton, it can automatically decline cases involving known bad actors, allowing the fraud team to focus on more intensive cases.
“Persona enables us to look at all signals from a customer and catch red flags in a way that the human eye can’t. Rather than manually comparing past applications or scrutinizing ID photos, Persona’s AI helps us automatically identify these bad actors, saving us a lot of hassle,” says Yaseen, Newton’s fraud intelligence manager.
Yaseen also calls out that manual review had traditionally been completely left up to an analyst’s discretion. But with Cases, Newton’s team of fraud analysts can consult Persona-captured risk signals and provide the right amount of human interpretation, enabling a more holistic investigation process.
A 360 view of each customer
Cases also offers Yaseen’s team a centralized view of each case, which speeds up investigations for both fraud analysts and customers. Analysts no longer have to open multiple systems and they can now access passive risk signals collected during the verification process.
As he calls out, “our team can go through each tab and have a structured way of addressing each investigation. The tags from our customer experience team provide a helpful starting point, and by following the information Cases provides us, we can get through investigations even faster.”
Tight partnership that evolves with Newton
Finally, Newton appreciates that Persona is able to provide guidance on how to improve its fraud review process.
“We have a super open communication loop with our customer success manager. She’s always proactive about letting us know what we should be leveraging and how we can catch fraud more effectively,” Yaseen mentions.
Results: With Persona, Newton reduces time and operational burden during its investigation process while automatically verifying more users
As Yaseen puts it, both Newton’s fraud team and its customers benefit from its partnership with Persona.
“With Persona, we can automatically decline known malicious actors, which saves us time and protects our customers. And our automatic verification rate is a lot higher than it used to be, which is a win for our customers,” he says.
As Newton looks toward scaling in Canada and other locales, Persona will continue powering both its verification and investigation efforts, with Cases especially key to Yaseen’s fraud team. “Cases is the home base for all of our fraud investigation. We like to think of it as this essential hub of information for our fraud teams. We can get a high level understanding of all investigations very quickly, but deep dive as needed,” he says.
If you’re interested in building a more robust and efficient review process with Cases, reach out to your CSM or get a demo today.
