What are the areas in which banks's Anti Fraud teams focus on?
In my experience during working with 4-5 different organizations, I have found that in some countries bank's primary focus for fraud prevention & detection is only on Retail Banking and they ignore Corporate Banking and support functions like Procurement, IT and Operations. I was thinking about the reason and other than the high visibility & numbers in Retail banking couldn't think of other reasons. Could it be that in retail Banking mostly it's external fraud but in other functions it is internal fraud (senior management doesn't want to prevent it!) or it's lack of expertise (Anti fraud teams of the bank)in these fields. To use professional skepticism, one scenario is that in India most of the Anti Fraud team learned the trade secrets of Fraud Risk from the couple of professionals who had worked in one MNC bank, where specialization was on identifying, preventing, investigating frauds in a DSA (Sales vendors) model, who were primarily used for sourcing retail loans & Credit Cards. Due to this background when Fraud Risk function was started in other private sector banks, all of them focused only on the sales channel frauds, over a period some attention was paid to collections function where frauds were noticed in vendor selection/case allocation (kickbacks, relatives given agencies), asset disposal (kickbacks from 3rd parties) and settlements ( taking kickbacks for offering lower settlement value) but beyond that not much was done. Some progress has been made in last 3-4 years where banks paid more attention to frauds in Rural Banking and selectively in corporate banking. I haven't seen much happening on the liability side of the banking operations where accounts are opened for money laundering or en cashing fraudulent proceeds or in the general procurement and IT procurement area. Similarly not much is known whether banks are doing work on prevention/detection of frauds in forex and trade services. Having worked in Africa & UAE for a shortwhile, i would say that banks in these regions are looking at frauds across the functions including the support functions like Admin, IT, Operations, Branch Banking etc. This despte of Indian Banking regulator have a robust systems in place including the specific guidelines related to fraud risk management. My take is that frauds can/will happen in area which deals with money/information/decision making so if a sales channel can source fraudulent loans to achieve targets , credit function can take kickback for loan approvals, operation function can take kickbacks to process the loan despite of incomplete/suspicious documents, fraud risk function can take kickbacks to not report identified fraud. Similarly in procurement /asset disposal favoritism takes place in exchange of financial/non financial favors. It's a big bad world of frauds but unfortunately anti fraud teams are ill equipped to handle this due to various reasons including lack of qualified professionals, tendency to not share information with each other and lack of resources (Technology/investments etc), Being a optimist, I think it will change over a period.
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