Rachel Topalov

• Lead the strategic design and execution of BMO's Retail & Business Banking Lending Fraud controls roadmaps (North American mandate)
• Leverage professional networks and industry knowledge to strengthen Lending Fraud controls landscape
• Accountable for oversight of Analytics & Operations fraud teams to ensure tactical implementation of lending risk controls including rules/alerting strategy enhancements
• Lead the transformation of Lending Fraud Operations including determining resource prioritization, growing resources to align with growing business needs and driving efficiency gains through strategic investments such as case management solutions.
• Enable the scaling of BMO's fraud controls including strategic development of document verification capabilities to combat document fraud
• Achievement: Led the strategic implementation of BMO's first real-time fraud adjudication engine for Lending applications which incorporated vendor risk data to identify 1st party & 3rd party fraud
• Achievement: Developed and successfully championed a business case for onboarding of 16 incremental FTE to support Lending Operations & 1 Analytics FTE.
• Achievement: Designed & implemented BMO's inaugural Collusion Monitoring capability leveraging data science / outlier modelling to identify concentrated lender fraud risk in commissioned sales force (Mortgage Specialists) with ability to scale solution to various servicing channels

• Responsibility for the Strategic direction of Tangerine's Fraud Management business including the integration of forward-looking fraud risk mitigation solutions across all fraud typologies to drive trust and security
• Accountability for the identification and integration of Client Identity & Access management capabilities and the design of Tangerine's Internal Fraud Program
• Responsibility for the creation of business cases to support executive buy-in and program investments in technical capabilities
• Cross-enterprise collaboration with key risk partners including Analytics, Information Security & Corporate Security
• Provided people manager leadership for 5 employees who support Fraud Risk Management and Fraud Program Management to drive quick to market execution of strategic recommendations
• Partnered with technical delivery teams (agile) including Enterprise & Solutions architects and developers to deliver on fraud program technology roadmap
• Drove annual fraud program planning on fraud loss plan, resource and program funding to ensure balanced capital investments and management of operational expenditures to support fraud mitigation
• Achievement: delivered ~$1.2MM in Fraud loss avoidance by refactoring existing organizational capability in FY23
• Achievement: delivered $92M in monthly operational cost savings by restructuring dual vendor strategy for one time passcode use

• Accountable for the strategic design and execution of RBC's Internal Fraud Monitoring program and Investment Fraud Strategy for Personal & Commercial Banking, Wealth, US Bank and Caribbean businesses
• Socialized the Internal Fraud Program with Senior Executives and risk audiences to gain appropriate buy-in and financial investments for roadmap development including data science and operational resources.
• Defined the data ingestion and data usage strategy for the Internal Fraud Program using risk-based prioritization framework (based on employee usage rates of the various systems, identified system controls gaps etc.)
• Achievement: New Internal Fraud Program capability (machine learning) identified ~$1.68MM in Internal Fraud abuse resulting in recoveries within the first 5 months of capability inception (in POC)

• Responsible for the integration of key regulatory initiatives such as C-86 and OSFI and FCAC reviews impacting RBC's Sales Practices & Conduct Risk posture
• Collaborated with key enterprise and P&CB stakeholders to support Bill C-86 review to assess current and future state solutions and to determine impact to controls and training.
• Established relationships with National Office partners including Legal, Employee Relations, Privacy, Learning & Development to drive successful implementation of conduct and culture related initiatives.
• Achievement: Developed and Delivered Consumer Provisions Training (as part of C86 regulatory requirements) to +17,000 client-facing employees.

• Responsible for the development of RBC's first machine-learning monitoring and oversight strategy leveraging unsupervised machine learning models to identify inappropriate sales behaviours
• Designed and expanded the sales practices & conduct monitoring strategy including socializing with retail and risk partners
• Identified conduct breaches and coordinated with stakeholders to create enhanced monitoring ecosystem
• Delivered recommendations on controls enhancements to training, management practices / routines, role design, incentive and performance management design, product design and systems stemming from investigations

• Responsible for conducting Internal fraud investigations, with a primary focus on lending portfolio fraud (secured and unsecured)
• Performed investigations using comprehensive investigation tactics to obtain necessary evidence; tactics included the utilization of email filter technology and use of excel to identify trends in data collected.
• Leveraged BMO's code of conduct and federal laws as a framework to assess new allegations and gauge the impact and severity of emerging risks.
• Achievement: Concluded 47 mortgage specialist investigations, resulting in 39 dismissals for significant code of code breaches

• Responsible for driving branch performance in client experience, and financial growth metrics (KPIs) and management of the branch P&L statement
• Mentored staff to increase sales success in lending and investments, productivity and customer engagement goals (net promoter score).
• Cultivated community engagement to drive overall branch profitability
• Steered a team of 9 sales professionals and collaborated and created meaningful relationships with internal stakeholders and partners to achieve business goals.
• Achievement: Led a team to deliver 116% (1st quartile) against their sales KPIs while being ranked #2 overall in Net Promoter Score amongst the mid-town region. Branch previous ranked in 4th quartile of both sales and NPS

Experience in contact centre roles including Credit Cards, Personal Banking, outbound marketing/dialler administration