THE CHALLENGE

The £135,000 luxury car that changed everything

In mid-2024, Close Brothers Motor Finance faced a sophisticated fraud that would fundamentally change their approach to document verification. It looked like a dream deal for the sales team: financing a £135,000 luxury car for £86,000 with a substantial £50,000 deposit.

Then, four months later, payments stopped.

Investigation revealed the devastating truth:

"The £50,000 that we saw was completely fake. If we'd have had Resistant AI in place, we know we'd have saved that because we obtained the company bank statements, ran them through the system, and immediately it glowed up like a red beacon."

That initial £86,000 turned into a £400,000 gross loss.

This type of sophisticated document fraud was becoming increasingly difficult to detect through their existing manual reviews, which consumed 30-35 minutes per application, with 15 minutes dedicated solely to fraud assessment.

When suspicious documents required deeper investigation, multiple team members would get involved, creating bottlenecks that delayed customer approvals for hours. This manual-intensive process threatened to undermine their core mission of making vehicle purchases easy and accessible for customers.

THE SOLUTION

12-Second document forensics transforms operations

Soon after the luxury car incident, Close Brothers Motor Finance embarked on a trial of Resistant AI’s Document Forensics across their operations. Team members began dropping documents into the Web interface and the transformation was immediate.

The service immediately revealed 18 additional cases of fraud.

While they recovered some losses through vehicle repossession, the resource-intensive recovery process highlighted a critical truth: prevention is far more effective than remediation.

And prevention had just gotten a lot easier.

Now, they got a document fraud check in just 12 seconds, replacing the previous 15-minute manual fraud assessment process. The underwriting team’s efficiency doubled and they were able to focus on genuine risk evaluation rather than time-consuming document authentication.

"The vast majority of cases are obviously genuine, and that means that the genuine customers have a frictionless journey. It's quicker, and in the competitive market, people want to finance quickly.”

Fraud savings exploded as the system prevented more and more cases before they could cause damage.

"So far we’ve prevented £800,000 of pure fraud since August 2024: Somebody actually changing statements or payslips. You don't do that unless you're trying to get finance disingenuously."

The solution was so effective that when a two-month gap occurred during contract negotiations, the noise was deafening:

"Because of the time it took us to onboard a new supplier, we didn't have Resistant AI for a two month period after the trial. The business was going absolutely bananas on me. When are we going to have this? Why haven't we got it?"