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Fortiro, a technology company specialising in fraud, will partner with the lender to introduce an automated screening process to comb through the roughly $200 million of loans that Resi settles each month.
Under the new partnership, Resi will integrate Fortiro’s technology into its income verification process, enabling submitted documents to be checked for hundreds of signs of manipulation or synthetic generation at the point of submission.
The technology will initially be used to assess income documents such as payslips, bank statements, and tax returns. It extracts relevant data, checks the integrity of each document, and flags any suspicious features for further review.
The dilemma of non-standard income
As a lender that caters to borrowers who may fall outside of traditional lending criteria, such as self-employed customers and alt-doc applications, Resi said that income verification can be one of the most arduous stages of the lending process.
Screening documents earlier will give Resi’s credit team additional intelligence while reducing avoidable manual review, the lender added.
“Resi has succeeded by looking beyond a standard tick-box approach and taking the time to understand each borrower’s unique circumstances,” Resi CEO Campbell Smyth said.
“Fortiro gives our credit team greater confidence in the authenticity of application documents without creating unnecessary friction for brokers or borrowers. By automating routine verification processes, we’re freeing our people to focus on what they do best, applying expertise, judgement and common sense to help more Australians achieve their property goals.
“This partnership enhances both the strength of our credit process and the quality of the experience we deliver to customers and brokers alike.”
The AI arms race
Fortiro CEO Sean Quagliani said generative AI had made fraudulent documents easier to create and harder to detect.
“Documents are a crucial part of lending processes, providing holistic information about income and serviceability. While technology has enabled fraud to become easier, the vast majority of borrowers are legitimate,” Quagliani said.
“Fortiro provides confidence that documents that support important decisions are genuine, while flagging high risk applications for lender review. Screening documents as they enter the workflow gives lenders the best chance of stopping suspicious applications before they progress.”
Fortiro and Resi’s partnership comes as fraud, particularly that which is linked with AI, has made headlines.
Last week (19 August), AUSTRAC’s Fintel Alliance analysis of data from 10 major Australian banks under Operation Claw revealed “system weaknesses” across the lending sector, as well as “potentially hundreds of millions” of dollars in suspected fraudulent loans.
The suspected activity was predominantly linked to properties in Sydney and involved inflated incomes, misrepresented employment, and fabricated or unverifiable business activity used to support loan applications.
Other major banks, such as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and National Australia Bank, have also undertaken investigations that have found potentially billions of dollars in fraud.
CBA has since announced the development of an advanced agentic AI system designed to help detect fraud, which can monitor more than 80 million signals each day, including transactions, card, and online payments, as well as interactions across digital banking channels.
Other systems, such as FraudX, have been launched to help the broker channel specifically to detect and prevent fraud.
Many banks, as well as the Australian Banking Association, have called for access to verified ATO data through the Consumer Data Right as a way for lenders to strengthen loan application checks and reduce the risk of fraudulent income information being used to secure finance.
[Related: AI adoption is surging, but are lenders’ data systems ready?]
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