Fighting Fraud: Breaking the Chain – new report from House of Lords fraud committee

Fraud makes up 41% of all crime against individuals in England and Wales, but just 1% of law enforcement is focused on tackling financial crime.

A new report published by the House of Lords Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee argues that the UK is not doing enough in the fight against fraud.

One of their key conclusions was that, though there are several sectors involved in the fraud chain, they do not all face the same incentives to tackle the problem. All ‘fraud-enabling industries’ need to fear ‘significant financial, legal and reputational risk’ so that they act on this.

The committee calls for the introduction of a new corporate criminal offence of ‘failure to prevent fraud’, applicable across all sectors, accompanied by significant financial penalties.

What this means is an increased pressure on every organisation’s KYC process, which is at the core of fraud prevention.

KYC tools and technology historically haven’t been strong enough to fight fraud – automated solutions that depend on data sets can help with tick-box compliance and yes/no answers, but they don’t provide any wider insight about the people you are doing business with.

Finding this information out would depend on having teams of manual investigators behind every new business deal or transaction, looking at open source media and corporate records, along with PEPs, Sanctions and Watchlist checks. Doing this research for every transaction is impractical and even impossible for most organisations.

But thorough background research no longer needs to take up days of work or teams of researchers. Xapien is a rapid, automated solution that produces detailed, fully-sourced and auditable reports in 10 minutes.

Our platform enables everyone to know who they are doing business with, in just a few minutes. Organisations across sectors can focus on doing business with the right clients, safe in the knowledge that they are protecting their organisation from the financial, regulatory, legal and reputational risks incurred by ‘failing to prevent fraud’.

To find out more about our automated background research platform, book a demo.