Everywhere you turn, fraud is in the headlines. It doesn’t matter if you get your news online, on the TV or from the newspaper. There seems to be a new fraud story every day of another scheme. Are the current economic conditions pushing people over the edge? Is greed to blame? Are the new technologies and mobile channels tempting fraudsters for yet another thrill? Maybe it’s all of the above, but fraud continues to run rampant, especially in heath care, government and the financial services industries.
Just recently, while reading the news on fraud, this headline caught my eye: Homeless Organization Is Called a Fraud. Yes, the United Homeless Organization in New York, which is supposed to help hundreds and thousands of homeless and hungry people, is a fraud scam. What is this world coming to?
The good news is that whether your organization is faced with workers compensation abuse, Medicare and Medicaid abuse, mortgage fraud, or any other type of fraud, waste or abuse, there are solutions to help stop the fraud, help your organization operate more efficiently and safeguard your money.
In a recent interview with HSBC, a global financial institution that is taking proactive measures to fight enterprise fraud, Derek Wylde, the Head of Group Fraud Risk, Global Security and Fraud Risk, said that the bank has extensive anti-fraud policies that span the entire enterprise. According to Wylde, a big part of a bank’s relationship with customers is giving them confidence that they are protected against fraud, and balancing that with the customer's need to have access to services. He said “Fraud losses are true operating costs that go directly to the bottom line and affect our ratios.”
Enterprise fraud is such a widely used term, but few organizations or industries are really putting practices and technologies in place. I recently spoke with TJ Horan, Senior Business Director of SAS Global Fraud Solutions. Horan is actively involved in the development of the multiple implementations of SAS
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fraud solutions for HSBC. According to Horan, there are many definitions of enterprise fraud.
“To many financial institutions, an enterprise solution simply means the ability to combine data from several different transaction types,” says Horan. “For instance, these organizations may have a debit card fraud system that has access to non-monetary or call center data. But to other institutions, enterprise fraud is more about building a single view of the customer’s relationship with the bank and having the ability to take into account all of the customer’s activity across all of their banking products when making fraud decisions. It’s very exciting to watch as HSBC - one of the first banks in the world to truly invest in this idea – realizes this more complex vision of enterprise fraud management systems.” So while, fraud is not going away anytime soon, one suggestion is to look to vendors that have proven and stable technologies that can evolve in sophistication to help you stay one step ahead of fraudsters who might be planning their next attack. Read more about HSBC’s fight against fraud and how the SAS Fraud Framework can help you get moving in the right direction.
You’ll also want to download this SAS special report on fraud to learn expert best practices for combating fraud: Crimes of financial passion: High-tech practices to beat enterprise fraudsters at their own game.
