Enterprise Bank Boss Counsels Banking Industry Operators on Electronic Fraud

Kindly Share This Story:

Banks  Electronic Fraud

 From Benjamin A Ameh, Lagos

 With the rates of growing incidents of Electronic Fraud (e-Fraud) in the financial sector of the economy, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise Bank Limited, Ahmed Kuru, has called on banks to establish anti-fraud departments as a way of curbing the menace.

While delivering a keynote address titled “When All Goes Wrong: Mediation and Arbitration Best Practices,” at the just concluded August 2014 meeting of the Nigeria Electronic Fraud Forum (NeFF) in Lagos, Kuru who was represented by Chuks Ekpunobi, the bank’s Head, Strategy & Corporate Transformation said this was also the time for banks to collaborate to eradicate e-Fraud, which he also described as a “common enemy.”

Koru said statistics provided by the Financial Institutions Training Centre (FITC) was frightening because it showed that electronic fraud has been in an upward trend since 2010. He noted that this is worrisome because the increase is both in terms of the number, volume and sophistication that are driven by high powered technology.  Unfortunately, however, he argued that bankers, auditors and internal control officials of financial institutions may not be as knowledgeable as the fraudsters themselves. Therefore if we are to make progress in this direction, banks need to as a matter of urgency, establish anti-fraud departments with staff that would always be ahead of the fraudsters in every sense of the word.

According to him every financial institution should take the issue seriously because this year alone, the industry has lost about N2 billion to electronic fraud from the first and second quarter. Should this trend continue, about N5 billion would be the estimated loss by the end of 2014. If this is not checked, the trend will lead to unbearable levels of capital erosion in the system.

The establishment of anti-fraud units will provide continuous improvement initiatives in fraud control and present a platform for the implementation of viable fraud management solution to highlight deviations of fraudulent transactions from normal transactions; ensure compliance to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) initiatives of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as well as guarantee the implementation of other Fraud Control measures and Security initiatives both on the network, and applications of the bank. It will also ensure the implementation of a Database Access Monitory (DAM) and Account Access Monitory (AAM) solutions among others.

While commending the organisers for choosing to deliberate on this trend that is plaguing the industry, Kuru said he sees the establishment of the NeFF as a collective step in the right direction in the attempt to eradicate e-Fraud in the financial sector because NeFF provides the opportunity for practitioners to share knowledge about global trend in e-Faud, industry trend as well as new methods of perpetrating fraud among other issues that affect every bank. He argued that this was the only way banks can protect their funds from relentless fraudsters.

 


Kindly Share This Story:

Related Post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

amehnews greetings

x
%d bloggers like this: