Case study

Building a comprehensive three-year global Fraud Strategy

Lead partnerAlistair Catto

Our client, a major European banking group, had faced a surge in fraud levels, with over 30,000 fraud cases a year. APP Fraud incidents alone were 24% up, with gross losses of over £11 million.

Multiple areas of the bank needed to engage in fraud prevention, including Financial Crime, IT, Operations and commercial functions. The bank lacked a cohesive fraud strategy, relying on disparate approaches and technology vendors, leading to inefficiencies, rising costs and regulatory concerns.

Our client recognised the need for a globally applicable fraud strategy, aligned with their wider global strategy for digitisation and automation to support growth.

Industry segment
European Bank
Function
Fraud
Core capabilities
Fraud

Key outcomes delivered

3-year roadmap to improve fraud prevention with budget and resource allocation secured.
5 key areas of fraud addressed across 6 countries.
Efficiencies improved in the handling of 30,000+ fraud cases annually, through consolidation of technology vendors and process standardisation.

Approach

BeyondFS were briefed to prepare a comprehensive 3-year strategic plan for combatting fraud across the entire bank.

Our small team of consultants had deep fraud prevention experience, enabling us to draw on lessons learned in other financial institutions. We identified the biggest and fastest growing areas of loss, and their causes. We also reviewed relevant regulatory requirements and identified areas where the bank was at risk of breach.

We considered fraud across 5 key business areas (payments, cards, lending, internal, and investment fraud) liaising closely with the heads of fraud in each of these areas to align our recommendations with business needs.

BeyondFS assessed existing technology infrastructure and vendors, recommending an approach for implementing new technologies and data analytics to improve fraud detection. A broader partnership with an existing vendor was recommended across payments, cards and lending, with a rollout strategy developed by BeyondFS.

The fraud strategy prioritised customer experience, with easy-to-navigate channels for raising fraud concerns, obtaining information, and resolving cases. A fraud ‘value proposition’ was developed to help customers understand why procedures sometimes appeared more onerous than necessary, stressing the positive value of increased authentication measures.