Transcript for pre-recorded age-friendly banking webinar on OA’s EFE resources for financial institutions (full video)


>> ERIN SCHEITHE: Thank you for joining our webinar on CFPB resources to help financial institutions serve older account holders. This webinar is being brought to you by the CFPB Office for Older Americans. 

Before we get started, I want to read a brief disclaimer. This presentation is being made by a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau representative on behalf of the Bureau. It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance or advice of the CFPB. Any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter's own and may not represent the Bureau's views. 

The CFPB Office for Older Americans develops initiatives, tools, and resources to help protect older consumers from financial harm and to help older consumers make sound financial decisions as they age. 

>> KATE KRAMER: What is Elder financial exploitation? This is a definition that is commonly understood by aging stakeholders. It is fraudulent or improper actions by an individual that use the resources of an older person for somebody else's benefit and result in depriving that a person of the rightful use of their own resources. However, the age at which somebody is considered an older adult and any related definitions will vary among states and civil and criminal laws. 

Elder financial exploitation could include taking cash or valuables, unauthorized withdrawals, unauthorized credit card use, the inappropriate sale of financial services or products, improper use of a guardianship or conservatorship to exploit an older person, or perhaps the misuse or takeover of banking relationships. 

There are many things you can watch out for when you are working with their customers or members. Things like sudden changes in their savings or spending habits. Withdrawing or wiring money from their accounts without explanation, perhaps using the ATM more frequently or at unusual times or locations, not paying bills that are usually paid on time, purchasing things are services they do not usually purchase. Adding names to bank accounts or other accounts that the account holder is unwilling or unable to explain, or changing the beneficiaries of their will, life insurance, or retirement funds unexpectedly. Sometimes a caregiver, friend or relative may want to begin handling a person's money. Particularly, this is concerning when it happens without proper documentation on file such as a power of attorney or guardianship. 

Before we get into the resources today, I want to note that financial exploitation can happen to anyone. When it happens to an older adult, it may be considered elder financial exploitation. The problem with financial exploitation or financial abuse is not limited to older adults. Studies have found that younger people actually have a higher frequency of losing money to scams, although they lose a lower dollar amount on average. Often older adults are living on fixed incomes which makes the financial loss particularly difficult for them to weather. It could be a lot to someone who does not typically have much left over in their budget at the end of the month. 

Some older adults may be at particular risk because they do have a regular income and accumulated assets. They may also be reluctant to report exploitation by a family member, caregiver, or someone they depend on. Some older adults may be unfamiliar with managing financial matters. For example, if a spouse that had typically handled the money passes away. Often, we do not plan for the potential loss of decision-making capacity. As our ability to manage our money changes, we may not have planned ahead and put services in place to prepare for that. 

Let's talk now about some consumer education tools that you can use in your community with your customers or members. The first of these tools are our Managing Someone Else's Money guides. The CFPB has guides for four common types of financial caregivers. These help people learn how to manage somebody else's money. We have guides for agents under a power of attorney, guardians and conservators, trustees, and Social Security and Department of Veterans Affairs. We have six state-specific guides for Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, Oregon, and Virginia. CFPB also provides tips for adapting these guides to your state. These are great to share with caregivers or clients who have questions about power of attorney, guardianship, or other financial caregiving roles. You can order these for free and keep them to hand out as needed. They are available in English or Spanish. 

The next resource is Money Smart for Older Adults. This is a program designed to help older adults identify and avoid scams, fraud, and financial abuse. We created this in conjunction with the FDIC. You can use the instructor guide, PowerPoint, and resources to present this program for older adults in your community, or you can just order copies of the resource guide to hand out or review one-on-one with a client, friend, or family member to learn and discuss together. You can order these resources for free and in bulk from CFPB. In the resource guide, there are resources and activities to help people learn the material. There is a glossary of key terms and it can be a stand-alone handout for distribution to older people and others. It has an overview of current scams, summary, post-test and evaluation forms, and a glossary to enable you to present this in your communities. 

The next resource is our popular fraud prevention series. This helps you share important information about avoiding common scams. This was originally designed to be used with meal delivery programs, but we have seen it being used by financial institutions and community organizations in a variety of ways. You can order placemats, posters, bookmarks, and table tents in English or Spanish to display at your branches or used for events and gatherings. You can also download our digital handouts to share by email or on your website. 

One way that financial institutions can collaborate with community partners is through an elder fraud prevention and response network. These are ongoing collaborative efforts for various types of professionals to work together to detect, prevent, or respond to elder financial exploitation. Key partners often include financial institutions, law enforcement, Adult Protective Services, legal aid, victim services organizations and others. 

The Office for Older Americans started an outreach initiative to help communities in several different states and help existing networks grow in size or scope and enhance their impact. We developed a model for identifying potential networks and building support for these networks. Network members like financial institution staff and law enforcement officers shared with us that they are already working busy full-time jobs and could use some ready-made resources to establish a network in their communities. 

To meet this need, we released our network development guide in 2020. These resources can be used for planning and facilitating a network, reconvening and establishing the network, expanding network capabilities and much more. If you are interested in joining an existing network in your area or hoping to start a network, please check out the network development guide. 

We also have consumer advisories on all of the topics you see here and more. You can order these in bulk and keep them at your branch or hand them out at events, seminars, or luncheons. There is one that I wanted to highlight in particular because it teaches older consumers how they can work together with their bank or credit union to protect themselves from fraud. This is our consumer advisory on preventing financial abuse. 

I would now like to shift the topic a little bit and talk about the CFPB resources which include reports, recommendations, and advisories for financial institutions to help them address elder financial exploitation. 

Our Advisory and Recommendations and Report for Financial Institutions on Preventing and Responding to Financial Exploitation was released in 2016. This contains promising practices to enable financial institutions to prevent elder financial abuse and intervene when they recognize it. Some of the key recommendations in this advisory include:
* To develop, implement, and maintain internal protocols and procedures to protect stakeholders from financial exploitation
* To train personnel regularly and frequently and include information on warning signs that may signal elder financial exploitation as well as action steps for prevention and response
* To use technology to monitor for signs of financial abuse and to review filtering criteria against individual patterns and explore additional risk factors that may be associated with financial abuse.
* To make timely reports to law enforcement and Adult Protective Services regardless of whether it is mandatory or voluntary under state or federal law
* To file suspicious activity reports and use the checkbox for elder financial exploitation
* To comply with the electronic funds and transfer act
* To establish procedures so customers can provide consent to sharing account information with designated trusted third parties if they believe the customer may be at risk of financial abuse. 
You can order bulk copies of the Advisory and Report and Recommendations to share with your staff or download it and read it online. 

We released an update to these recommendations in 2019 which is focused on how financial institutions can best report suspected elder financial abuse to authorities such as APS and law enforcement. The highlights of this update include an overview of recent federal and state legislative changes including state statutes, such as a review of state laws on authorizing transaction holds or disbursement delays when financial exploitation is suspected, an overview of the Senior Safe Act, and an encouragement for financial institutions to report all cases of suspected financial elder exploitation to the relevant federal, state, and local authorities. We also encourage a response if Adult Protective Services, law enforcement, or other entities request documentation related to elder financial exploitation. We encourage institutions to provide that supporting documentation related to financial exploitation to the appropriate agencies. 

Let's look more closely at SARs. As you likely know, the federal Bank Secrecy Act mandates that financial institutions report suspicious activity that could indicate some financial criminal activity to FinCEN, which is part of the Department of Treasury. The financial institutions that must file SARs include banks, credit unions, broker-dealers, and quite a few others. Access and knowledge is generally limited to law enforcement and certain financial regulatory agencies. Law enforcement can use the information to trigger new investigations, support ongoing investigations, and identify subjects they may want to investigate further. 

In 2011, FinCEN put out an advisory noting that SARs are a valuable way to report financial exploitation. They talked about some basic red flags that could help financial institutions spot elder financial abuse, including transactional and behavioral red flags. Transactional could be frequent large withdrawals or characteristic attempts to enter large sums of money. Behavioral red flags are things that a bank teller might notice. For example, an older person comes into a branch with a caregiver and they look uncomfortable or their behavior is out of character for them. In 2013, FinCEN introduced electronic filing for SARs. They included a designated category or checkbox for elder financial exploitation. 

The Office for Older Americans worked on a report involving elder financial exploitation SARs. To do this, we analyzed a limited number of structured data fields in SARs that involve elder financial exploitation. The timeframe for this analysis was from April 2013 to December 2013. We looked at about 185,000 SARs. The elder financial exploitation SARs were those where the filer either selected the financial exploitation checkbox, or selected the other category under the suspicious activity category and wrote some variation of the word “elder” in the text field, like elder abuse or elder financial abuse. We read full transcripts of a representative sample to help make findings about the patterns, issues, and dollar amounts. We worked closely with FinCEN staff. 

We found that elder financial exploitation SAR filings quadrupled from 2013 to 2017, from about 1,300 per month to 5,300 per month. This was a much greater growth than the overall rate for all SARs, which was only 40%. We know that the incidents reported in the elder financial exploitation SARs likely account for just a tiny fraction of the incidents in a given year. Based on one of the lowest estimated prevalence rates, there were 3.5 million elder financial abuse cases in 2017, yet only 53,000 SARs were filed in 2017. Please read our SARs report for more information about key findings on monetary losses, including information about the dollar amounts lost by individual consumers and filing institutions. 

>> ERIN SCHEITHE: Thank you so much for joining us for this webinar. We hope that the resources that we presented are helpful to you. If you would like more information about the Office for Older Americans, you can visit our website at consumerfinance.gov/olderamericans or send us an email to olderamericans@cfpb.gov. 

Thank you so much for joining us and have a great rest of your day.