Like a billion other fans I watched the World Cup final with many great hopes (and nervous energy). All the hopes were crushed well before the game ended. And because I’m such a one-track mind, I started thinking hmmm what lesson can fraud fighters take away from this defeat so we can go back on Monday with our game face on.

Couple of big lessons –

1. Vanity metrics: People behave the way they are measured. Everybody knows that. But let’s start with the wrong metrics to track. In cricket, we have a habit of pointless counting. Number of 50s, number of 100s, number of times an Umpire had umpired (yeah I swear, it sometimes borders on the ridiculous). These metrics are a big distraction and only add nuisance value and clutter. I’m not against individual milestones but

A] – A count of runs in a game is just a number.

B] – More often than not it serves to distract from the true result. In fraud too, we fall for individual achievements like promotions, size of the team etc. which I think are largely personal vanity metrics. In fact, total size of the savings deployed is pointless too. We all know larger losses, larger portfolios and larger attacks drive larger savings.

2. The correct metrics: The better metrics should be rate based. Easy question to ask yourself is does the metric have a denominator. If not, it’s quite useless, actually. Total runs, total wickets, what have you. The more useful ones would be strike rates, batting averages, wickets per innings etc. Likewise in fraud, we cannot only look at the numerator. How much did we save in fraud versus how much was the attack, how much business did we lose. What’s the cost of procuring that shiny new toy. Cost of a wrong decision, etc. But rarely do we look at a truly holistic ROI.

3. Most important metric: India won every single game in the tournament and lost one. The final. (Bummer.) So, what metrics separate the wheat from the chaff. I would recommend the below metrics to the BCCI. How about – thankless fielding points. David Warner was stopping the boundaries like his marriage and mortgage both hung on it. We never track fielding performance or dropped catches. We all know catches win matches. Another one would be game changer points. Players who are able to turn the tide in a game and drive home a win. Such heroism is quickly forgotten because nobody created that hero table in the database. In fraud too, I lament that we never track some metrics like who thanklessly spotted the trend. How many gaps she found. How quickly did we change the course of a mounting loss curve. How often did we thwart big attacks. The difference between a win and loss in fraud is whether we turned the bend at all or did we just accept the attack levels as the new normal.

Anyhoo. We lost the cup. And there were many a slip between the World Cup and the lip. And that’s ok. I am going to quote a former POTUS here. “Bade bade desho mein chhoti chhoti batein, or something like that 😊”