Financial Frauds Targeting Older Adults Are an Epidemic – Carefull Uses Artificial Intelligence to Detect Them

 

Welcome Todd.

Thank you. Good to be here. 

So tell us a little bit about Carefull. 

Carefull as a platform for what we call financial caregiving. There are 45 million people in the US alone just to start who are coordinating or contributing to the daily finances of another person or an aging loved one. They’re watching bills, they’re protecting from fraud. They are managing the day-to-day finances in a million ways, contributing and coordinating from siblings, collecting money. It’s a ton of little activities that typically their banks and financial institutions don’t help with.

And at the same time, there’s 50 billion of fraud. In this space people taking advantage of an aging population from the outside. And I think we read a lot about that scams and coming from calls and email, but there’s also, unfortunately, a lot of fraud that comes from within a trusted circle as well.

Sometimes a close family member or a trusted advisor, a cousin, and that can drain the assets as well and put someone who’s aging in danger. And so there is no financial services platform in this space yet. That’s really here to provide the management and protection for someone who’s a financial caregiver.

Someone who takes care of another. So Carefull its job is to put the protections, the permissions, the AI and intelligence into this space. And that’s the basics behind carefull. 

What made you start this company?

I spent the last 10 years in product development, a lot of that with banks and banks and insurance companies and financial institutions. They see this aging demographic, and they see an opportunity to serve them better, but because they’re banks, they also see it as a problem.

Because they see the assets shifting. 20 and 24 trillion in assets in North America alone shifting to another generation and they see themselves losing assets and losing customers. And and they also don’t really know how to serve these customers. So, if you were going to ask someone at a bank how to serve the aging population, then they’ll basically come up with the idea of bank for old people. And it’s not a good idea. The way to serve the aging population is to take care of those who take care of them. So it is to take care of their adult sons, and if you can give them the right tool.

So after spending so much time with banks and seeing both this problem, but not really a good enough answer, my co-founder and my friend, Max, who had recently sold his company to Google. Together max and I decided we wanted to work on something that actually made a meaningful, positive difference, not just money. We were on our second, third company at the time. And and so we were passionate about this space because it’s technology, it’s financial services, but it’s also healthcare and it’s also families. And so when you mix all that stuff together, it becomes very technical, but also very emotional.

And you can do a lot of good in the whole ecosystem. So we chose this opportunity, because we’re passionate about it. 

So it sounds like you’re currently focused mostly in the US because banking is a highly regulated industry. Can anyone expect Carefull to be available globally?

Absolutely. So what’s really interesting about what we call financial caregiving is that in most regions that are not the US it’s actually much more natural of a behavior. So, in Asia in Latin America, and in many parts of Europe and the middle East, taking care of your parents, even financially is something that’s expected.

And it’s even in honor, which sibling is going to step in and coordinate and take of things. And in the US it’s actually the opposite and not in a good way. It happens to everybody, but everybody’s surprised when they become a financial caregiver.

And so, we actually see a huge global market for Carefull and we’ll be available in the months ahead, starting in Europe and Asia. There are different dynamic, different banking and infrastructure dynamics and regulations. So there’s a bit of work to do there, but I would expect certainly in the next 12 months for us to be outside of the US.

To answer a slightly different question, but still relevant, people are financially taking care of people who are living in their home country. So we have a lot of people from India and the sub-continent in the US, their parents are still in India and they need ways to financially support and monitor what’s going on back at home as well.

So some of it is regional and some of it’s cross border. And we hope to be able to take on all of that pretty soon. 

How does it work?

There’s really a big machine learning platform sitting underneath this, to recognize behavior patterns. So what carefull really is, is a service that basically you hook up a transactional account for your mom or your dad or just a loved one. And within an hour, we can see backward a year.

We know what normal looks like for your mom. We know what or her typical spending behavior and patterns are.We have a big machine learning platform underneath that gets to know your mom’s behavior.

And then very quickly, we can say, this does not look normal. This looks like cognitive decline, perhaps even, this looks like dementia. We can spot a lot of things that actually start to look like healthcare issues and to do that, we need access to a few accounts. And what is complex about serving people across borders is sometimes we can’t ask for access to those accounts as easily as we can in the US, some are very simple, but every country has their own set.

What will be true is, the fundamentals of using AI and machine learning to take the work away from financial caregivers, because what’s happening now in every country is you look basically adults take their parents log in information and impersonate their parents, they log in and then they look for fraud or they try and like do things themselves.

Not entirely legal and it’s not entirely a good idea as well, because that also sometimes can enable bad things. And it’s also so much work and they don’t really know what they’re looking for. So the idea here is if you can build a digital rule book of what good looks, and what we should be looking out for, we look for the things that banks don’t. So it’s certainly a global ambition and because it’s a global human problem. 

Absolutely. So you mentioned that your AI knows how to detect anything unusual in financial data, but how do you detect if something is out of the ordinary with their health?

With health, we can see some things, not others. Johns Hopkins University in the US, put out a study in November of 2020. And it said that

dementia can first be diagnosed in the wallet and financial behavior up to six years before it can be diagnosed in the doctor’s office.

 

And typically what you see is missed payments, certain strange patterns like duplicate payments, paying something two or three times, the banks doesn’t care about that, but we can see that as a signal to certain cognitive issues. 

We also can see behaviors like cash payments. We can see things that look like forgetfulness. Credit score hits is another important sign. When you have a credit score hit, it’s not just bad financial behaviors. Sometimes it could be the onset of dementia. That doesn’t mean every time you pay late that you have to mentia of course. But it does mean that if we can see the patterns, with a big enough data set, we’re able to actually get ahead of things and, and actually prevent a lot of bad things from happening. For example, when someone is a sloppy payer, meaning that they’re forgetful, and when really this could be a dementia, then a lot of bad things happen in those six years before you intervene.

And what we really want is to pull up the right conversations. Put the right kind of protections and start to involve the healthcare community and involve the larger bunch of caregivers. So it’s not only like a brother and sister saying, oh, that’s just mom. She’s just forgetful.

It actually could be a lot of other things that need intervention or even something quite serious. So it’s those patterns. We stay in the financial data, not in the biological data. But we can see a lot.  I’ll give you one more example. So banks, they think you love it when you save money.

So if your mom doesn’t spend so much in October, then you get this smiley face from your bank or a financial management service app. We actually think that’s warning for someone who is aging, because it may mean, if someone does not spend as much, they might not be taking care of themselves. We want to see, are they buying their medicine? Are they going to the grocery store? We want to understand that they are taking care of themselves and spending the money in the right place.

That’s a little counterintuitive, the banking world says wonderful. He didn’t spend that much. And we say, actually, hang on. We need to make sure the right people are getting paid, the caregiver, your pharmacy, grocery store. It’s another example of, of using finance to spot healthcare.

That makes sense. So when people join Carefull, you basically get all their older financial data from their bank. And you start looking for anything out of the ordinary that could indicate that there’s a problem. When you identify something like that, what does that look like?

How does that translate into a notification on the caregiver’s side?

So depending on the alert we have things that look very urgent and things that look like you should keep an eye on them. And certain things that just look like, it’s out of the ordinary. A financial caregiver, a caregiver in general does not want a hundred emails about their parents money. Typically a caregiver has children and a job, and doesn’t want to engage in this every day. So our job is to really sort out the signal from the noise and show them just the things that need their attention and really make a big deal of when it is truly urgent, not just interesting or different. So what we’re really calibrating is the deviations that require something urgent. So if we see an unusual wire transfer, that’s is urgent. Because wire transfers 9 times out of 10 are not a good thing if it’s happening with the aging population.

So they can see that directly on their phone. They’ll get an email about that as well. And when they’ll click back in, they’ll see exactly the details of that and what time it happened, who it was sent to, and I think the most important thing is what they do with it. So one of the features of Carefull is it’s is the ability to click on that alert and export it to the bank or to your sibling or back to your mom and everyone sees the same thing, within the environment we can say, what is this? Do we need to get involved? Do we need to get in and stop it? Cause typically what happens today in caregiving, you see something, you think about it, you call the bank, you sit on hold for hours. They won’t talk to you, and if they finally do they say go talk to your mom. You basically go in circles. So resolution takes a long time. I think one of the most interesting things is within families. If you say, oh, there was a wire transfer and you say that to your brother, maybe, or your sister, you don’t always agree on what the problem is. And so everyone’s seeing the same transparent data, helps families see something, act on it and resolve it.

And so the first thing we do with an alert is we export it to the Carefull circle, a group of people that needs to see this information and it can be  your doctor, your financial advisor or even just your siblings and family. And then there’s lots of different resolution paths, depending on what the issue is, whether you need to call the bank or to change your passwords, or to stop doing something that actually is maybe not good judgment.

So that’s what happens after you get an alert. 

Does an alert about a cognitive health concern behave differently. That’s a difficult conversation to have with your mom or dad. 

It’s a really good question. What we don’t do is send an alert that says your parents have dementia.

That would be a strange one to get on your phone. So for things like that, particularly because we don’t diagnose, we look for patterns that need further investigation. And what we say is we start conversations and we give caregivers the tools to ask really good questions and say, so if we see double payments or triplicate payments of the same thing, it’s one thing for someone to say, oh, my mom is losing it, it’s another thing to actually look at an issue and sit with a with a physician or with mom and say, is this happening a lot? And then go deeper and find other places. So we have the third pillar, we talked about the first two. I talked about monitoring and communication. The third is content.

Which is a series of roadmaps and checklists that help to have conversations. So now we have a wonderful lead caregiver named Cameron Huddleston who is part of our team who wrote a book called “mom and dad- we needed to talk”, about how to speak to your parents about these issues.

And so sometimes it’s starting the right conversation with a physician or a parent and intervening much earlier than would have normally happened. Cause often with caregiving, you find people see it, but they don’t really want to believe that something is bad. And so the number one thing people do in caregiving is nothing.

There are wonderful caregivers, but most people when they’re pulled into caregiving kind of wish it would go away. And so what we do is we try and facilitate conversations that are much easier and allow you to say, okay, let’s start learning about dementia. Let’s start looking for signs. We can get someone into that world and even transition them to Alzheimer’s association or a doctor and start to involve the right ecosystem. Versus you get an alert and it’s full on diagnosis. 

So you’re not only letting them know that something is out of the ordinary, you also provide them with the tools to actually do something with it.

Yeah. And you know, if you get a scam, for example, it’s not healthcare related, we can help you with the AARP. We’ll help you. They have a certain set of resolutions for specific kinds of fraud. And so we’ll connect you to that resolution, even hotline sometimes.

Giving people things to do is really important. 

Absolutely. So what’s the bigger vision, where do you see Carefull five or 10 years from now?

I like to say that finance financial caregiving, which is a term that we’re still trying to introduce to people because not everyone thinks of themselves as a financial caregiver.

They think of themselves as doing the thing they’re supposed to be doing. And they don’t realize that they deserve more tools and their time back and more intelligence and technology to be able to do this well and appropriately. So one, Financial Caregiving. We’re lifting that. And we hope to have more companies and more healthcare companies and financial services companies help pull that up into the consciousness for for the aging population.

That’s number one, but we also say is financial caregiving is a category. There will be lots of companies and solutions, both from the healthcare and the financial services side that help throughout this journey because financial caregiving is a 20 year relationship.

As soon as you’re brought in, it can be as short as two years or as long as 20. And that means there will be, as you talked about five or 10 years, there will be lending products to help people get into senior housing, but stay independent for longer, beyond the reverse mortgage. As you see today, there will be really interesting memory care products and services hopefully from the larger healthcare ecosystem to help, once we spot something well, what happens next?

And how do we continue to build that support structure around the aging population. So Carefull is going to. Build a platform that we hope will be effectively relevant for this whole life stage, not just for this moment and this needs stage. So we want to become effectively the bank for financial caregiving.

We see ourselves as being the brand and in a life stage right now that doesn’t have a brand. It doesn’t have a toolkit. It doesn’t have support. So a big platform level of vision, and that could mean accounts, could be bill pay. Our roadmap has all those things on it and then eventually tying into the healthcare ecosystem itself.

So a big vision, but a lot to do because people don’t Google financial caregiving, they just don’t. And so we have a lot to do, to be in that intent stream and find the right physicians and find the right companies who are also having this conversation so that we can help each other and and add to the toolkit that caregivers need.

Absolutely. And it’s really a big vision. And like you said, people just don’t realize that they’re in this position and you know, 10 or 20 years ago, people who were caregivers probably didn’t know that they were caregivers. So I’m sure that in five years or even sooner people will know how to Google it and they will find Carefull.

Totally. I totally agree. We think the timing is right. And the timing is right to make a big investment here and in bringing this top of mind. So we’re excited. 

Cool. Is there anything else that you would like to add? 

I would say a call to action for anyone in the aging ecosystem who sees monitoring and protection and coordination on the financial side. Whether it’s in memory care or if they see it as relevant to to their own business, we would love to work with, partner, share our content. So I would just raise the flag to say, we have been really open and really excited to find large institutions and small ones that are interested in helping at this life stage.

So if there are a few out there that want to help we’re really open and and really excited to work with other people who are helping. 

Why is the best way to reach you?

You can reach me directly, my email is tr at getcarefull.com. And you can go to hello at getcarefull and that will get a broader group.

Perfect. Todd, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. 

We’re really excited to be part of this community. Thank you for inviting me on, I had fun. Thanks so much.