A recent report by accountancy and advisory firm BDO suggested that the volume of reported fraud in 2017 hit a 15-year high, with a total value of fraud increasing 538% to £2.11Bn. Considering the impact of Covid-19, companies have had to alter the conventional ways of operation and adapt to a more online-centric business model.
Since the eCommerce sector is booming, it has given rise to an increase of fraudulent activities, and companies will be faced with the same problems as before, but on a greater scale. According to a Wall Street Journal report - the overall percentage of attempted fraudulent digital transactions rose 35% (in-terms of dollar volume) in April from a year earlier.
There are two main types of digital transactions that has seen an uptick in fraud recently:
- Friendly fraud: The financial pressures as a result of the current economic climate causing more people to commit fraud - customer makes legitimate purchase and receives item(s), however, disputes the transaction with the merchant to issue a full refund.
- Malicious fraud: Criminals taking advantage of the increased online activity, leveraging identify theft and phishing attack mechanisms to attract people looking for financial aid or new jobs – stealing identify details and committing fraudulent transactions.
To tackle these challenges companies must now look to new and innovative solutions to combat this rise in fraud across many sectors. One of the key focus areas is fraud detection/investigation - How can merchants better differentiate between what is a genuine transaction and what is fraudulent? How can they automate the follow-up actions to ultimately reducing the number of false positives and augment the human decision-making process? The answer is Intelligent Decision Automation.
The combination of RPA and AI augments the human decision-making process by providing rationale for every recommendation, which in turn acts as an audit trail for any automated decision-making. Thanks to our recent partnership with Rainbird, a Blue Prism Digital Worker can now refer to Rainbird to solve a problem and then act on the answer provided, without ever needing to refer to a human worker:
The Intelligent Fraud Investigation solution delivers an end-to-end automated fraud investigation process for major organisations - including data gathering, case decisioning and follow-up action, helping address and mitigate the growing challenge of monitoring and preventing sophisticated fraudulent activity, in this unprecedented time of economic impact from Covid-19.
For more information on how you can add intelligent decision automation to your platform, please visit our Digital Exchange.