Member Article

Report: Financial fraud apathy among UK businesses revealed

Bottomline Technologies has today launched a new annual report, the UK Business Payments Barometer: De-risking for growth, which reveals that despite confidence in anti-fraud measures, fraud is still perceived to have a significant impact on UK business revenues.

The report found that over 4 in 5 (69 percent) of financial decision makers were confident in their anti-fraud measures put in place to help their business. Despite this encouraging figure, half of UK financial decision makers believe their revenue has been negatively affected by fraud.

The comprehensive report surveyed over 400 financial decision makers including business owners, CFOs, CEOs, CTOs and COOs, on liquidity, fraud and payments. The report will become an annual fixture and aims to monitor the health of UK businesses from a financial decision making and risk perspective. A broad range of businesses were surveyed, ranging from small businesses to enterprises that employ over 10,000 employees.

Over half (52 percent) of SMEs are most concerned about external cyber fraud threats, such as their systems being hacked, whilst a third (34 percent) of corporates are most worried about the threat of external exploitation of their internal payment processes and staff. Potential threats include invoice diversion fraud and CEO fraud (known as ‘whaling’); an email that appears to be from an individual or business known to the receiver, but instead is sent by criminals hoping to exploit the receiver.

“The number of companies choosing to employ a strong security posture in the fight against fraud is ever increasing”, said Richard Ransom, payments solution lead at Bottomline Technologies.

Ransom continued, “Gone are the days where companies just dealt with the repercussion rather than taking precaution. It’s crucial for financial decision makers to be fully aware of the potential fraudulent threats against their business payments to ensure revenue is affected as little as possible.

“Providing ongoing training and education for employees, putting guidelines and procedures in place for protecting sensitive data on corporate devices, and regularly advanced threat and adversary intelligence solutions can all help reduce the risks of fraud.”

Bottomline Technologies warns that companies need to ensure they have the correct security measures and awareness in place to protect them as much as possible against all types of internal and external payment fraud.

The full report can be downloaded here.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ed Adshead-Grant .