Quantexa has teamed up with Deloitte to target illegal finance. The deal comes a few weeks after the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) claimed fraud was at epidemic levels. In its report, RUSI claimed there were more than 3.7 million reported incidents of crime in 2019/20. The concern is that the impact of COVID-19 and people working from home will have significantly increased that in 2020/21.
To address that problem, Deloitte has turned to Quantexa’s Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI) platform. It is added the CDI as part of its Economic Crime Governance and Risk Management Frameworks. It intends to use the CDI to monitor payment flows to get a more accurate picture of risk from customers and third-parties.
Vishal Marria, CEO of Quantexa, said: “We’re delighted to be partnering with Deloitte, whose proven global expertise in compliance and governance is the perfect fit for our CDI technology. New risks demand new technology and techniques. Organizations need to rethink the use of traditional rules-based approaches to monitoring activity, which are inflexible and incapable of dealing with the complexity and scale of today’s enterprise data demands.”
Quantexa sees digital transformation and lockdown as drivers of fraud
Quantexa believes that opportunities for criminals have increased during lockdown. It calls out both digital transformation and lockdown as two key drivers. It reasons that the move to remote working has created challenges for compliance processes. For many employees, remote working has, indeed, increased the risk for phishing attacks.
For example, unexpected emails asking to make sudden payments can easily be verified with colleagues in an office setting. This is because turning to someone beside you and asking a question is easier than creating a call through conference or collaboration software.
For digital transformation projects, the challenge is more about integration with third-party systems. Few organisations can do any checking of suppliers other than those they are directly connected to. It’s difficult to verify your suppliers’ suppliers or customers’ customers. Once these extended supply chains are compromised, cybercriminals can work their way across many companies to hit their target.
Software breaches are also a problem. The recent Microsoft Exchange breach has allowed bad actors to attempt to compromise finance chains. They have sent emails from legitimate addresses attempting to redirect payments or shipments of goods. All of this is hard to track and needs better threat management.
This is what Quantexa claims its CDI software will help deliver.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There have been many warnings over the risk that remote working has brought to businesses. It is not because remote working is a failure, but because companies have not adapted key processes to manage it.
This deal between Quantexa and Deloitte will provide a new way of looking at key commercial data. It will allow companies to do additional analytics to identify risk and where it is coming from. That the deal integrates Quantexa’s CDI with other frameworks from Deloitte adds to the overall solution’s effectiveness.
The question is, how much will it reduce economic crime? That is very hard to quantify, and it should be noted that both Deloitte and Quantexa have chosen not to attempt it. What can be said is that any improvement in detecting fraud is to be welcomed.
