At the early stage of the pandemic optimists were predicting a rapid ‘V’ shape bounce-back to normality. However, as this crisis has continued there has been a reality check occurring as we witness countries all over the world stumbling back into various forms of restricted living and lockdown as the virus re-emerges into communities.
A recent piece of research by McKinsey amongst 2000 global executives in the banking sector pointed to expectations of a slow economic recovery and patchy growth at best. These executives all agreed on two scenarios for financial service providers; credit losses will be substantial, and income from interest is going to be significantly depressed for the foreseeable future. So there is going to be a double squeeze on profitability just at a time when these organisations need to make some significant investment decisions to ensure the fitness of their business to remain competitive.
Faced with this reality banks, insurers and others are all having to recalibrate the impact of the economic and behavioural changes that have occurred as a result of the pandemic on their customers’ lives - as well as the changes that will have to occur within their own organisations.
Tough decisions around the shape and size of their future workforces have already been some of the initial choices, as media reports have widely reported various redundancy decisions being taken. In the UK alone 100,000 jobs are reported to have gone or being at risk in the banking sector.
However, from a financial crime risk perspective the considerations are going to be very wide ranging and impact a range of areas within the businesses concerned. Heightened risks around bad-debt, fraud and increased customer vulnerabilities are going to be paramount over the next few years.
From a commercial perspective the evaporation of traditional ‘face to face’ routes to market has meant that truly digital methods of identifying and onboarding customers have had to be reassessed and reprioritised to ensure that they are fit for purpose.
Do the current platforms on offer provide the quality of customer experience required to be competitive - more importantly are they capable of properly assessing customer risk without causing too much friction on the sales process?
The prevalence of home working, now so common and likely to remain in place for some time, also has a double impact on financial crime and fraud risk teams responsible for protecting their businesses.
Not only does the prospect of increased numbers of customers working from home give fraudsters and cyber criminals much more opportunity - through the use of malware or social engineering tactics (such as posing as company help-desk teams) - but they will also need to consider the risk factors of their own workforce conducting business in this distributed/remote environment.
Additionally, as we have reported elsewhere in Connect, the increased levels of economic vulnerability of local populations is going to make the temptation of external fraud more prevalent amongst customers under financial distress - not to mention the fertile ground this offers for organised crime groups to exploit.
Banks, insurers and other finance providers would be advised to increase their ability to develop a more rounded view of risk. This can be achieved through a re-evaluation of the various data partners you work with to ensure that you have the necessary external intelligence to understand the external environment as things evolve in real-time.
Having the ability to link external intelligence to internal customer data to create a unified, 360 degree, view of the risks that customers pose will be essential to reduce the likelihood of exposing the business to financial crime - but also to improve your ability to treat vulnerable customers with a greater degree of fairness in what looks like being difficult times ahead.
Reduced levels of resource, exponential increases in the volume of inbound referrals, increased regulatory screening commitments, and the demands of instant decision making can paralyse a fraud or financial crime team. Taking advantage of the various analytic techniques that have become available can transform your ability to create a decision platform that can accommodate a real-time decision environment, without compromising the financial crime mitigation or compliance processes you need to satisfy.
Machine learning, predictive analysis and various other forms of sophisticated link analysis can all enable the automation and speeding up of decision making without compromising risk mitigation and compliance measures that are required.
The legacy of mergers that took place post 2008 has meant that many organisations have a complex web of fraud and financial crime risk decision making units that are uncoordinated and disconnected. This creates a huge burden on those looking to reduce the cost of customer acquisition while simultaneously trying to speed up the ability to ‘green-light’ applications and get products out to market. Creating a truly unified risk platform that unites the various disparate teams in the organisation and allows them to make effective real-time risk assessments will be essential. This will help to reduces costs and the likelihood of duplication or costly mistakes being made from a lack of data quality.
Criminals of all stripes are often repeat offenders and will have left a footprint that organisations can use to ensure they are not their next victim. Collaborative intelligence sources, such as National SIRA, CIFAS, CUE, or the UK Government’s NFI, have proved incredibly successful at helping companies to mitigate their exposure to fraud and financial crime. More recently opportunities to use Public Sector intelligence sources (in the UK) to help enrich data and identify fraud or other types of financial crime have also become available to use. The financial sector needs to continue to embrace the spirit of cooperation and collaboration in this regard to improve their defences.
Additionally many types of analysis techniques being deployed to block adverse business have been modelled on shared industry intelligence sources - and so it’s vital for these resources to be maintained so as to ensure that these techniques do not become inoperable.
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In this issue:
Is APP Fraud and Payee Authentication likely to be the most pressing fraud issue in 2021?
How to build an effective CBIL/BBLS loan recovery strategy
How are financial criminals using COVID-19 to adapt their operations?
Discover the latest National SIRA fraud trends for 2020
Find out how Allianz is using SIRA RTQ to create an award winning policy screening solution
Yoti discuss the future of digital onboarding customers
VRS' update on helping to identify and protect the financially vulnerable