The Modern Fraud Landscape and Reporting

If an organisation is to formulate a strategic approach to preventing and detecting fraud there is a vital need to ensure the strategy is based on accurate MI.

Problems arise when the MI is based on subjective rather than objective decision making, or wrong conclusions resulting from a less than thorough investigation. Over the last few years, there has been a marked reduction in the number of fraud investigators within the finance and insurance sectors. This places more pressure on the remaining resources. So, implementing an auto decline decision process to relieve that pressure is appealing. And why not, a decision made as a result of high risk event match is far more usable from a strategy planning perspective and for the business than wrong decisions or false conclusions made by an investigator. Auto declining a percentage of the highest risk applications frees up investigators to spend more time considering complex fraud referrals, to achieve the correct outcome. Accept or decline is a win/win.

However, it is important that the MI relating to auto decline decision is accurately recorded and shared, together with the high risk event that has led to the outcome to enable:

• Quality checks to be conducted periodically to ensure the optimal efficiency of auto decline decision making is being maintained

• Endorsement of the existing strategic plan

• The identification of evolving fraud patterns to facilitate a change to the strategic plan, and auto decline decision making parameters if required

• An assessment of cost benefit savings.

Soon Synectics Solutions will be introducing an auto decline status within National SIRA, the UK's leading syndicated database of known fraud cases. This will allow members of the SIRA syndicate to more effectively manage high risk applications and accurately record outcomes and syndicate intelligence on these applications. This helps an organisation to enrich their own MI and risk strategies and develop a clearer picture of a fraudsters' behaviour and MO.

This development forms part of a wider programme to introduce a new series of fraud typologies (or Reasons for Filing) within National SIRA. It is essential that the fraud classifications within SIRA meet the needs of the syndicate and reflect the new fraud threats we're seeing. This enables the growth of the National SIRA database so that organisations can continue to use the intelligence to build sophisticated fraud defences and risk strategies.

You can read more about Synectics' Reasons for Filing Update Programme in the latest issue of Connect.