Collaboration is key to battling fraud in the financial services industry

As technological advancements become more advanced particularly in Kenya’s financial services industry, so are the schemes to use it maliciously continues to play-out calling for deliberate need for collaboration among the sector players to address fraud, says Lanre Bamisebi, Group CIO – Equity Bank.

According to Bamisebi, “Business leaders must be aware of the trends and predictions that will allow them to implement internal as well as external controls and systems that would to help reduce the risk of fraud,” stressed Bamisebi while noting that the landscape of fraud is continually shifting and hence sounding an alert to financial services industry players to ensure that they do not become another statistic.

Noting that while the financial services industry experiences more breakthroughs in the use of technology that are worth celebrating in detecting fraud, several strategies which were applied in the past few years ago will become completely outdated, as fresh set of tactics will debut to tame fraud.

Bamisebi is assertive that despite the increasing concern surrounding the vulnerability faced by customers as money becomes more digital, there, the growth of digitization shall continue to evolve and become the norm because the business and personal benefits are far too strong.

“Digitization is the answer. There is no other alternative today and in the foreseen future hence the emphacis on the need for industry players to collaborate to tame fraud,”

Lanre Bamisebi, Group CIO – Equity Bank

 

“Digitization is the answer. There is no other alternative today and in the foreseen future hence the emphacis on the need for industry players to collaborate to tame fraud,” adding “It is time we shared data with each other,” said Bamisebi noting that telcos and banks, have an opportunity to blacklist suspicious persons and faciliate for their arrests.

Besides investing not just in more advanced technology, companies need get involved in the effort of minimizing the potential damge of fraud by detecting attacks as quickly as possible stressed Bamisebi. To this effect, he underscored that while the networks might be too large to prevent every attack from occurring, detection is crucial and therefore the drive towards combating fraud should be reckoned as more than just an IT problem and looked at as a business problem.

Bamisebi’s emphasis on the importance of collaboration could not be better demonstrated as he stressed the need for banks and telcos – a momove that would enable them to pool their resources together and consciously establish a regime that would continously detect and combat  fraud.  “Cartels that are conducting fraudulents acts and frustrating businesses are joined, but the targets they are attacking are regretably disjointed,” he affirmed while alluding to the irony behind the victims not being a single unit to find better solutions.

Equity Bank, said Bamisebi is on a path to change and disrupt the old paradigms regarding banking security since it is heavily reliant on the benefits of digitization, and the approapriate way for it to seamlessly sustain the momentum of digital transformation is to effectively deploy mechanisms that would uphold data privacy and ease of use.