Fraud costs banking industry US$67bn annually ; Two institutions commit to support country’s banks

The boom in digital payment platforms and digital banking systems have come with its own risks and cost to the financial industry.

Latest figures from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) indicaties that the global financial industry loses about US$67 billion to fraud related activities annually.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) also reports that about US$1.6 trillion is laundered globally through banks each year for criminal enterprises and terrorist activities.

In Ghana, the situation is no different as the 2021 Banking and Specialised Deposit-Taking Institutions (SDIs) and Electronic Money Issuers (EMIs) fraud report issued by the Bank of Ghana indicated that the banking sector lost GH¢61 million through fraud and other banking malpractices in 2021.

The need for banks to, therefore, strengthen their anti-fraud systems and anti-money laundering systems has become more necessary than ever.

It is against this background that IT solutions company, CWG Ghana has committed to deepen its collaboration with financial crime risk management company, Clari5 to jointly help banks to combat enterprise fraud and money laundering.

In a media interaction, the Chief Executive Officer of Clari5, Rivi Varghese, who is on a business visit to Ghana, said the two institutions were committed to help Ghanaian financial institutions maintain their trust with customers.

Trust is essential

He said Clari5 currently serves over 710 million accounts globally, operates in 24 countries and processes about 10 billion transactions each day.

He said the company was, therefore, ready to bring this expertise and experience to help Ghanaian institutions.

“Trust is so essential and if we lose trust in our financial system, then our economy collapses.

“That is the reason why central banks and commercial banks invest heavily in making things trustworthy. There are normally about 10,000 attacks on every bank each day which requires that every bank strengthens its systems,” he stated.

The Managing Director of CWG Ghana Limited, Harriet Attram Yartey, said Clari5, which was one of its strategic partners, was in the country for a visit which seeks to strengthen the business relationship between the two institutions.

She said the visit was also to ensure that some of the customers that have already started engagement with the company were moving forward in the right direction.

Ms Yartey pointed out that the CWG had been in business for over three decades across the continent and would be 20 years in Ghana next year.

“Our business cuts across all markets, from telcos, banks, oil and gas companies, governments, manufacturing companies among others.

Over the years, we have helped 100s of businesses across Africa and our goal is to ensure that we remain the benchmark for IT excellence in Africa,” she stated.

Providing business solution

For his part, the Head of Project Management and Corporate Development at the CWG Ghana, Oluwaseun Layade, said the CWG was not just an IT company but a business solutions provider.

“We have moved away from just being an IT company. We look at business problems and we use IT to solve them to enable the businesses to scale up, especially in this day and age where everything has moved to the cloud.

“Businesses did not want to move to the Cloud but COVID-19 taught us a difficult lesson and people that did not want to move had to make that immediate transition and the CWG was able to assist a lot of organizations in making that transition,” he stated.

Source: Daily Graphic