Fraud & FinCrime: Are we doing enough?

Is enough being done to monitor fraud across industries beyond the financial sector?

In the UK, fraud is estimated to account for 40% of all crime according to the latest National Fraud Crime Initiative report.?Reading that number, I would think that not enough is being done to monitor #fraud or #moneylaundering across industries beyond the financial sector.

But it’s worth noting within those numbers, the improvements using technology such as strong ID Verification providers to catch fraud are leading to increases in the cases reported across jurisdictions.

Non-regulated industries have the advantage here – to learn from the way financial services have fully adopted technology, and to know the questions to ask in order to prevent money laundering and fraud.

ID-Pal serves the #identityverification needs of over 30 industries from recruitment, education, and healthcare sector to government bodies. These organisations are looking to easily verify the identity and address of those looking to do business with them, and this is all new to them. They need to know if the person is real, the identity document is real, and that they are the rightful owner and we make that possible with minimal effort and technical resources required.

The pandemic saw fraudsters take advantage and get better at finding weaknesses in processes that organisations both big and small assumed to be secure. The days of “how bad could it be” are over. Now it’s a case of “expect the worst”.

What more can be done to crackdown on money laundering across non-financial services industries???

I think I am voicing the opinion of many who believe there are too many misconceptions about what is understood to be a secure way to verify identities and addresses. From a suggestion that emailing documents carries no risk, to businesses not asking the right questions of their ID&V solution, it is a minefield and I can understand the confusion for people and businesses.

For example, the lack of understanding of #AML regulation versus the Data Protection Act for many industries is a challenge that can stop adoption or stop customers from using a business. It is not expected for consumers to understand this either. That is a deterrent to fully engaging with AML processes and fraud prevention.

There is an education piece missing there on secure technology-first platforms that meet multiple compliance needs all in the one solution - they do exist, they are not the stuff of dreams or need to be built from scratch.?For example, in ID-Pal we use biometric, document and database checks to perform checks in real time using an encrypted process that is GDPR compliant so you are preventing fraud at source and ticking a lot of compliance boxes all in one platform.

Fraud can’t be underestimated and only by changing to have AML and #KYC at the heart of your business can it really have an impact and become a natural way to operate for everyone across all industries globally. Equally, choosing vendors that make compliance easy but are also built to be compliant by design and have security at the core of how they operate, will make it easy to adopt the fraud prevention measures you need now and might need in the future.

#fraudprevention #frauddetection #compliance