In our latest whitepaper, Seven risk predictions for 2018, we explore which trends lenders are most likely to adopt to protect themselves, consumers and the global economies, whilst also going back to the most important aspect of any business: profitability. Here's our fifth risk prediction...
#5: Growth and divergence of financial crime risks expected to continue
In the last couple of years, the scale and complexity of cybercrime in particular has risen with too frequent announcements of banks who have fallen victim. This growth has come about due to the increased digitisation of our daily lives, with many of us now paying our bills, managing our banking and paying our taxes online.
Whilst this digitisation brings many benefits both to individuals and businesses, it also brings increased levels of risk, with the financial services sector at particular risk of an evolving and fast-growing threat. Many banks have made significant progress in their fight against cybercrime, with some having vast amounts of data collected from across their digital platforms, enabling them to have a much clearer viewpoint on who their customers are and their regular patterns of activity.
Some are even using real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to spot suspicious activity, as a function of this explosion of data and the fact that many payments now take seconds, rather than the days previously taken to process.
Finally, the new Payment Services Directive (PSD2), tied with the UK’s decision to adopt the Open Banking standard will result in the opening up
of customer data to a significantly increased number of financial service providers.
This proliferation of activity and transactions across organisations increases both the potential risk of data security breaches and the likelihood that suspicious behaviour may go unnoticed, as each organisation will have a more limited view of their customers.
These factors, combined with the growing potential and usage of cryptocurrencies (using blockchain technologies, with their increased levels of customer anonymity), mean that the financial crime landscape will continue to grow increasingly more diverse and complex during 2018.