Covid stress on banks
First results from a FICO (www.fico.com) survey is showing how COVID-19 continues to put stress on fraud and financial crime prevention at UK banks with 49% of respondents saying it is a major challenge having multiple systems for managing fraud and financial crime.

In a new study (https://www.fico.com/en/latest-thinking/white-paper/whitepaper-impact-covid-19-fraud-and-financial-crime) by FICO and independent research firm OMDIA, 79% of respondents from UK banks said that working from home had a high or major impact on the effectiveness of their financial crime prevention.

“Just as the pandemic put huge stresses on the health care system, it put huge stresses on fraud and financial crime management teams,” explains Toby Carlin, Senior Director for Fraud Consulting at FICO.  “Teams that collaborate in person and work with large software systems that have restricted access found that working from home hurt their productivity. This was compounded as the volume of fraud attacks rose.”

The impact of having multiple software systems for fraud management and financial crime compliance was also cited by UK respondents.  This was the top technology challenge for 21% of UK respondents, which puts it at the top of the challenges.  Almost half (49%) of respondents ranked it first, second or third among their technology challenges, the most of any challenge.

“Banks are feeling the pain of having fragmented software for managing fraud and financial crime.  Even though some 80% of the functions between fraud prevention software and AML software are the same, the systems are nearly always separate, and the teams are usually separate too,” continues Carlin.  

“In our survey, 64% of UK respondents say these teams don’t even report to the same person at the bank.  The latest systems, such as our FICO Falcon X, provide these technologies in a single platform, which can catalyse an integrated approach at a bank.”

The FICO study consisted of 110 interviews by OMDIA with senior executives driving, managing, or directly supporting financial crime, in the US, UK, Brazil, Germany, the Nordics and Canada.