Financial Crime 2022 – Industrialized Fraud Looms for the New Year

Glenn Fratangelo, Head of Strategy and Marketing, Enterprise Risk Case Management
> Financial Crime 2022 – Industrialized Fraud Looms for the New Year

Within the past year, many financial services organizations (FSOs) grappled with the impact of the pandemic, and in the case of fraud, with corruption on payments related to the reimbursements afforded to consumers and businesses during this timeframe. Unfortunately, this was the perfect target for fraudsters. As we move into 2022, emerging issues have already begun to fall into the sights of financial services firms. Post pandemic, as FSOs pivot from storefronts to a dominant online, digital environment, the importance of customer satisfaction and frictionless customer experiences have become even more critical to retaining customers and competing in a digital world. 

“Industrialized Fraud” a 2022 Focus

We believe that fraudsters will continue to refocus their efforts in 2022 by attacking a bank’s – or other corporation’s – assets by perpetrating fraud schemes attacking traditional payment channels. Increasingly, the industry is seeing well-trained, funded and equipped fraudsters with the ability to commit fraud at scale using advanced tools and technology, creating a trend of what we call “Industrialized Fraud.” We saw this manifested throughout 2021 in the form of business email compromise, along with the uptick of ransomware, and that will continue to become an area to address in 2022.

We will also continue to see that payments innovation, such as next generation payment products that include QR, BNPL, crypto and biometric will be focused on improving the customer experience led by advancements in digital acceleration and newly adopted infrastructures put in place over the past two years. Additionally, faster payments will become more prevalent and even faster. The new ISO 20022 standardization will offer a universal messaging language that will allow machines to read messages with better automation and faster resolution. It is forecasted that over 80 percent of high value payments will be processed with ISO 20022, which will be driven by broad adoption.

Customer Experience Emerges as Key Focus

While innovation continues to be part of the vision in financial crime fighting worldwide, we will see that many FSOs will first look to payments innovation, focusing on streamlining the customer experience. Led by the digital acceleration and infrastructure changes over the past two years, the new ISO 20022 standardization will enable safer and faster payments with compliance being adopted by new real-time payment entrants such as FedNow, RTR, Swiftness Instant, as well as current real-time payment rails.

As part of the target on customer satisfaction, we have already seen essential liability shifts associated with fraud scams in Europe, and we will begin to see this in the U.S. and other countries. We’re seeing this shift in liability for fraud loss associated with scams from the consumer to the bank, helping to protect the consumer from the prevalence and sophistication of complex scams such as social engineering, Authorized Push Payment fraud and Business Email Compromise. Fraud loss associated with scams will continue to grow significantly in 2022 supported by fraudsters’ ability to access personally identifiable information on the deep and dark web and weaponize it against their victims. Technology will advance and focus on these themes, particularly on the influence of the deep and dark web and its monitoring.

We will also see fraud strategy and prevention teams shift from risk mitigation to business enablers as a smoother, frictionless customer experiences (CX) continues to improve. CX is no longer a nice to have, but a key focus for fraud teams at FSOs as well as within contact centers — this is a byproduct of the prevalence of digital banking and faster payments as these interactions must be seamless and secure. As a result, we now see fraud teams and risk mitigation placed more directly in the middle of CX conversations.

Identity fraud will continue to accelerate and expand, becoming a core component of payments fraud, money mules and account takeover. Specific to the U.S., the Federal Reserve has created a new definition and classifier for Synthetic Identity Fraud (SIF), as they have acknowledged the significant risk these manipulated and fake identities pose, as well as the need to fully track fraud losses associated with SIF and build strategies to deter them from being created.

Intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and unsupervised machine learning (ML) will be critical to realizing a better customer experience, which will require strategic investment and monumental change at scale. Part of the nexus of rationalizing change in 2022 will be increased automation and speed of detection. AI and ML will be necessary for process automation that decreases friction across the payment lifecycle. The result will be highly automated with more efficient outcomes with more substantial data and better fraud-fighting in the coming year ahead.

To prepare your organization for 2022, learn more about our fraud solutions here.

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