3 Phone Calls Banks and Insurers Can't Afford to Miss

SUMMARY

Card blocking, claims and fraud lines ring at the moment a customer's money is at risk. Each carries a regulatory obligation, and when one fails, the bank or insurer usually carries the liability. Contact center reports rarely capture those failures, so the only reliable check is to test each line as a customer would.

They are the smoke alarms of financial services: nobody checks them for years, until the night there's smoke.

Card blocking: when the line fails, the loss moves to the issuer

Under PSD2, the EU's main payments law, card issuers must give customers a way to report a lost or stolen card at any time, and a customer who reports it doesn't pay for what follows.

Earlier this year, an adviser to the EU's highest court argued that banks must refund unauthorized payments first, even when they suspect customer carelessness. Every minute customers can't reach a blocking line, the issuer carries the losses on that card.

On a local line at one global card business Klearcom works with, every language option asked callers for their card number as designed, apart from one. That option told callers their number wasn't accepted and to call back. Picture a customer in a train station with their wallet gone, hearing that. Klearcom found the fault by placing a call in that language, from that market.

First notification of loss: the claim starts before the claim form

First notification of loss is the first call after a crash, a flood or a burst pipe, and it's where an insurer wins or loses a customer. A bad claims experience has already pushed one in four UK insurance customers to switch, and nearly a third say they'll leave at their next renewal.

Regulators are watching. The FCA, the UK's financial regulator, has 11 investigations open into firms that may have let customers down, and more than half are insurers.

Claims lines face their hardest test on their busiest day. When a storm hits, a whole region calls at once and an overflow route that sat idle for eleven months suddenly carries the load, often with an automated menu or AI agent struggling to understand a stressed caller on a weak mobile signal.

Fraud reporting: the call that decides who pays

Americans reported a record $16 billion in fraud losses in 2025, and fake bank callers did the most damage of any scam posing as a business. Many of these scams start with a fake security alert, which is why banks tell customers to hang up and call the number on the back of their card. That advice only works if the number answers.

Over one weekend, an unauthorized change to a card business's phone menu hit around 120 of its numbers. Its voice estate lead told Klearcom that if the change had stuck, the team would never have known it was hurting customers.

Where the revenue sits

A call that never connects leaves no ticket, no handle time and no complaint, so the dashboard looks healthy. When Klearcom audited one global card business's number database, it found more than 280 of its 3,000+ numbers rang out unanswered or played an invalid message.

What good looks like

A test proves a line worked at the moment the test called it. Its real value is shrinking the time a failure goes unnoticed, from whenever a customer complains to the next scheduled test.

QUICK ANSWER

Quick answer

Find out whether your card, claims and fraud lines answer in every market you serve.