15 March 2023

UK Finance: Has compliance lost touch with what we’re trying to achieve?

Educating the public and protecting the most vulnerable customers lies at the core of this requirement. The most recent Annual Fraud Report from UK Finance explores the scale of the UK’s fraud problem as well as the various methods used by criminals to exploit their victims.  

It highlights that an eye-watering £600 million was stolen through fraud and scams in the first half of 2022 alone. Banks’ advanced security systems prevented another £584 million from being stolen. 

The crux of the challenge is that criminals continuously pivot and adapt as they come up against sophisticated anti-fraud measures. Make gains in one area of fraud prevention and another threat pops up to replace it, like an endless game of whack-a-mole. 

What’s more, the threat isn’t isolated to the financial services sector. As the annual Cybercrime report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions highlights, most frauds begin far away from the walls of the banks and credit card companies that are ultimately targeted. They often originate as a phishing attack on customers of a TV streaming service, utility company or, since the pandemic, parcel delivery services.

For this reason, increasingly the fight against fraud is becoming a cross-industry effort – built from a network of organisations cooperating and sharing intelligence to stem the flow of stolen information that fuels this destructive crime. It stands to reason that to fight networked fraud, industry must act together, like a network. 

It’s for this reason that LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is proud to once again be the headline sponsor at this year’s UK Finance Economic Crime Congress on  30 March at The Brewery, London. This flagship networking event brings the entire fraud prevention community together to discuss the most pressing and topical challenges keeping us awake at night: money laundering, financial sanctions, authorised push payment (APP) fraud and anti-bribery and corruption, to name a few. In a world of uncertainty, you can rest assured that the future of fraud intelligence sharing across industry and sector will be a central theme of this year’s event. 

Among the highlights of the event will be a lunchtime peer-to-peer workshop discussion on the key findings of the 2023 True Cost of Compliance report. This report, published on 1 March 2023, found that £34.2 billion is being spent by UK firms per year on financial crime compliance – equivalent to three quarters of UK defence spending in 2021/2. Yet the UK doesn’t seem to be getting any more effective at prevention. Anecdotally it’s thought over £100 billion of dirty money washes through the UK each year and less than one per cent is prevented...

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