So fraud sweep, so the main part we were just talking about there, is primarily for sort of small community banks or mid-banks as well. Well, there's no reason it couldn't go up. Right, I mean, it could scale up. Marketing and business-wise. Right, a lot of the customer base has historically been of that nature. And so, you know, on the business side of things, what's it like selling to banks? Well, I mean, I've sat in on some of the sales, but obviously Greg does most of it. It's, banks are an interesting market because they don't, there's no competition in banks in how we would normally conceive it. It's such a regulated market, more or less, if you get in there and you don't, as long as you do what the regulators say to do, you're pretty much guaranteed to make money. And even if you mess up, they're guaranteeing all the funds and insuring all the funds, so you can't even really lose that much. Right. So there's not a lot of drive to be different. And in fact, so, well, actually, so what happens is you get, you've got the market pretty much starts from a point of stagnation. Then a new technology, a new process will come along. Some of the fringe early adopters pick it up. If it makes sense for the industry, it'll start to get some momentum after they prove out the value for it. Then you'll have kind of a second wave of adopters. Eventually it moves to mainstream. Then the market completely saturates and then stagnates again. So you have these periods of fluidity where kind of product waves sweep through. Right. And then you'll have stagnation for sometimes years at a time where all the vendors, all the people that aren't the banks themselves are simply living off support contracts, waiting for the next product to come through. Then they'll either develop such a solution themselves, buy up or make a partnership with someone else that has.
2:04Right. Then try to go in, lock up as much of the market as they can before the stagnation happens. And then they do that and then eventually it's stagnation and then you're done. It's very hard within the market to dislodge an existing supplier for a particular product. Yeah. So this same thing has happened a number of times. It happened in the '80s and early '90s with digitizing checks. So check scanners and automating that process. And then it happened in the late '90s, early '00s with online banking. Right. And it is happening with fraud detection now. So I mean, I think Greg, and that's really what Greg was trying to do was time the market to kind of hit this wave. And that's what you do in banking is you say, what's the next product? Okay, we need to get in late enough in the process that we can actually make sales somewhere. Right. But early enough that we're before the crest of the wave and we have time to build up so that by the time the wave crests, we're big enough to be noticed by someone that can buy us out and help us inject into the thousands of banks all around America. Right. So it sounds like more than being sort of a kind of a tight loop of boom and bust or even an innovation sort of driven way of deploying technology in banking that it's more of, there's sort of a collective, all right, it's time to upgrade our technology. And you've got to time the window when the industry, the banking industry as a whole thinks that now's the time to upgrade instead of now's the time to lock down everything. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's correct. The upgrades are always driven though by some external factor. If the banks didn't have to upgrade, they would never do it just to upgrade the system. Right. Because, you know, obviously they're not, banks aren't, as much as they may rely on IT, they would be happy processing everything manually if they could make money off it. Right. So the two reasons they're great is the growth in the customer sizes
4:07and the customer base has become substantive that they simply need a new product because old processes are simply imploding in trying to handle today's volumes of things. And that's been the driver of a lot of these factors. And then the other factor is simply regulatory issues. Like the next thing is you have to do a lot of BSA stuff, which is Banking and Syncrasy Act. So you have to look for the name Bin Laden on all your accounts. Ah, right. And banks have no way of doing that, you know, so they buy products to do it. And so now a lot of BSA products are starting to emerge in the market. We're actually looking at ways to add BSA tests to our engine because it's a very similar type of question as fraud detection. Right. And so that's kind of the next wave. Fraud actually came out because fraud loss, typically the bank just got insurance and ate it all. They didn't care. They would pay everything and take a few losses and turn them over to their insurance company and we paid out. And so it was a controlled cost for them. They were still making money, so they could maybe make a little bit more if they took the effort, but they'd rather just not take the effort. Right. Then they started to lose more on fraud for various reasons. And so fraud actually became a bigger loss than bad loans, which was a tremendous turning point in the industry. It's the type of thing no one ever thought would really happen. And once that did, then they had to start thinking of ways to control fraud a little bit better simply because it was outrunning them and the insurance companies wouldn't pay as much fraud as they were having, so they had to find alternatives. Right. So they were really driven to it by the fact that they were already losing money on it. Right, right, right. And so what are the kinds of fraud that people commit in banks? Probably one of the most damaging and common is a kiting where you go to one bank, you open an account, you deposit some money. You go to another bank, you open an account, you deposit money and you have to use checks for all this from the first bank.
6:13And so if you start with the initial $1,000, let's say, then you deposit $1,000 here for real. You write a check, deposit $1,000 over here. Then you run back to the first bank, write a check for $1,000 from bank B. Now you've got $2,000 in this bank because this one hasn't hit yet. And you go back to the bank A, now you write a $2,000, now you've got a $3,000 balance in this bank. And really, and so you're kind of making-- It's just a matter of the timing. Yes, by exploiting the timing differences. It's getting harder to do, but it's still done. You know, then there's just plain old-- One thing we're seeing a lot of, actually, is you can get check printing software and all that kind of stuff. So if you can get someone's-- Well, when I say someone, all fraud happens on commercial accounts. You know, there is the identity theft stuff isn't really the big loss for banks. I mean, it's terrible when it happens to a person, but in the industry as a whole, 98% of it is all on corporations. It's not through identity theft. They just-- There's so much money moving through it, and it's so big that no one notices the $50,000 check. Right. And so what we find are actually checks, and we're just flagging them for the banks. When they-- After we flag them and they catch them and they pull it up and do a little bit of research, often it's laughable. It'll be the wrong size check that was printed on an inkjet printer that, you know, has some random serial number on it because they don't know, you know, those things about the checks. Right. And it's ludicrous, but no one has time to look at them all. Right. So someone might find a, I don't know, a check from big company XYZ, and they duplicate the check and then write a check out to themselves. Yeah. Or they print a check out to themselves or whoever and try to deposit that check. Yeah. And steal money from the commercial company. Yeah. By virtue of a fake check. Yeah. I mean, you get more sophisticated things. I mean, you get-- Certain companies get set up as scam companies and they do forms of kiting or, you know, they'll pretend like they have a lot of, you know, they'll like, they'll deposit a bunch of banks, you know, false checks.
8:22They'll actually get a good history with the bank. Yeah. And then pretend like they got a bunch of income. They'll try to withdraw it all right away before the bank learns that all the, you know, all these checks that they deposit are really just fake. Oh, right, right, right. So that's kind of a limited kiting, but you have to set the company to do that and, you know, take the time to establish credentials. Right. But, I mean, we can spot things like that and we have, I mean, all of our, most of our banks have found something large that, you know, more than pays for the system at the time. Right. But the legendary rounding error fraud, does that ever happen, you know, as most recently in office space, right? Right. To do that, that's more of an interest system thing. So there, that would be someone committing, from within the bank committing fraud, which isn't. We're looking at external actors. Right. Perpetuating fraud in the bank. And at that point, there's really no opportunity for that kind of, for that kind of fraud. We did, I'm trying to remember if we actually implemented it or not, there is some theories about how numbers should group in actual payments. And so you can do analysis on numbers and a lot of times if people are, like, making up reimbursements for themselves, the numbers will be too random. Be like, you know, very often price is in the 99, right? Right. So that means you expect 99 or you expect some, you know, certain things depending on the taxes that were being charged. Right. But you don't expect 41 to come up a lot. So a lot of people, when they're just, like, making up reimbursement expenses will, like I said, the numbers end up being too random. We actually do have some tests that can analyze account history for that kind of thing. It sounds like there's a little crossover as far as spam filtering and as far as just building up a historic record. Oh, absolutely. And just matching patterns. And when something's out of the ordinary, then you just, you know, in this case, you know, in the case of spam filter, you stick it in the spam filter. In this case, you ask a human to intervene and make a decision.
10:23Right. Yeah. And a big part of the program is actually learning more about the customer. So we'll learn who writes big checks regularly, what to expect, and then start accepting those out of the tests. Right. So if the customer writes a huge mortgage check every month and that's their only big check, we do a couple things. One, we allow them to say, you know, don't, if you see this once a month, that's fine, just pass it. If you see it more, obviously, flag that. And also, you know, like, the system's smart enough to then take that out of the big item calculation so that we don't get skews for these one-off things. Right. So, I mean, there is a lot of sophistication kind of underneath, but at the end of the day, it's really just kind of doing a lot of reasonable checks on every single item that the bank has no way of doing and then just saying, hey, I think you should look at this. Then it's up to a person to come in and actually, I mean, we can't tell them it's fraud. Right. There's no way we can know that. But the person will come in, look at the original check image, maybe call the customer if they think, ask them if they actually sent it, and do the later investigation. But what we're doing is we're pointing out the items that they would never notice, and we're only pointing out those items. Right. Yeah, it's also similar to everyone experiences this with their credit card company every now and then where, you know, you can't charge something and you call them up and they just tell you there was some weird activity. Right. You have buying behavior that's out of the ordinary. Exactly. Like, buy three refrigerators in one day and then some gas, right? Yeah. Or something crazy like that.