Anderson Brothers Bank’s priorities for 2019 are expansion and fraud prevention. The bank, which operates 23 branches in South Carolina and is permitted to offer auto loans in North Carolina, has filed for a license to provide auto financing in Georgia in the first quarter of this year.
The bank will initially serve dealerships in Savannah and Augusta, which are close to the Georgia-South Carolina border and in reach of one of its underwriters, according to Micky Watts, Anderson Brothers Bank senior vice president.
For now, he told AFN, “we’re not going to go much beyond that.” Another item at the top of the bank’s priority list is fighting fraud.
In late October, the bank implemented PointPredictive’s Auto Fraud Manager, an analytical tool that can be used to spot fraudulent applications.
“We’re in the process of rescoring our whole portfolio to see if we have more fraud than we realize. We know we have some synthetic fraud, consumer fraud, and dealer fraud,” said Watts, who wouldn’t quantify the extent of the problem at the bank.