By Andrew Barnett, Head of Fraud Management, Nordea
What, for you, are the benefits of attending a conference like the ‘Fraud and Financial Crime Europe’ and what can attendees expect to learn from your session?
The benefit I get from attending an event such as this is 3 fold. Firstly to hear from experts in the area on what they are seeing and what they expect the future to look like whether that be from an attack vector or regulation. The second is the ability to network across our unique area to make new contacts and also reconnect with colleagues to discuss how each business is going. Third is as I am in the Nordics to understand what other part of Europe and further a field are seeing and the advances made.
How could information sharing across Europe be impacted after Brexit?
This very much depends on the outcome of the talks between the 2 parties. Being in the industry in Europe I very much hope that we can continue to share data in a responsible manner as we are all have a moral duty to stop the criminals committing fraud and laundering money through our systems. If the talks do not go the right way then we lose a partner in the fight against the criminals and will undoubtably not get as much data as we would if we partnered with the UK on this, leading to more potential opportunities for criminals.
In your opinion, how has increasing regulation impacted the industry?
The implementation of PSD2 has been a long journey and when fully implemented will do good for the fraud losses as they will definitely make it more difficult for the criminals to be successful. However I am sure that they will continue to adapt to get round the controls. Whilst in the Nordics we have had 2 factor authentication for some time, we have had to spend significant resource on the detection and reporting side, this has meant that they people have had to spend time away from improving system to implementing them to ensure compliance.
What advice would you give when working across different jurisdictions?
Firstly know the law and what you can do. Just here in the Nordics the laws for consumers, banks and data privacy are all different and we have to ensure that we are applying the correct level for data sharing between organisations, ability to use data for detection or indeed whether the consumer is entitled to a refund given difference in consumer rights and protections in different countries. Always challenge your legal team on what you can do!
Secondly have common systems that allow you to flex where the fraud is happening and utilises all the data from all the countries and product types of you can defend against new fraud attack vectors in 1 country that has already been seen in other countries.
How do you foresee the fraud and financial crime landscape evolving over the next twelve months?
I think we will start to see a convergence between the 2 areas, whether this be on mule activity and complex investigations or indeed learning from each other in the monitoring of payments for either money laundering or fraud.
The regulators will continue to hold us to account and quite rightly so and therefore we have to ensure that we are not just doing what is necessary but going the extra mile to really prevent and detect this financial crime.
