Are there cracks in your business’s security? Arm yourself against cybercriminals

Cybercrime is a growing threat.

Globally, corporations lose 5% or more of their revenue to occupational fraud every year and are increasingly exposed to attacks by both internal and external fraudsters and cybercriminals. The Covid-19 pandemic has heightened these risks.

In an environment marked by constant, evolving security threats, prevention is decidedly better than the cure. If you don’t prioritise your business’s security, it is not a matter of whether it will become a victim, but when.

XTND, a cyber security and fraud detection firm, offers a range of solutions that empower companies with the knowledge needed to take control and thwart attempts by opportunists and criminal syndicates.

Aligned with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), and with access to certified security specialists, forensic accountants and other industry experts, XTND can identify issues damaging businesses, solve them and, most importantly, prevent them from recurring. 

The company, which is part of EOH, Africa’s largest technology service provider, offers a trio of flagship products to help businesses bolster their defences:

• Veritas, a risk-mitigation platform for the insurance and assurance industries;
• ExposeIT, a 100% anonymous whistle-blowing app; and
• ExposeIT Crime Intelligence, a powerful tool to gather enterprise-wide insights.

Filtering out fraud

The Veritas platform has been designed specifically to identify and reduce fraudulent insurance and assurance claims. It has prevented the payout of almost R9bn in unlawful claims since it was first introduced to the SA market in 2012. 

Veritas uses artificial intelligence to automate business processes and gather data insights to identify claims that may be fraudulent — whether syndicated or opportunistic — in real time.  

The risk of new claims can be determined in seconds. This allows low-risk claims to be paid out exceptionally quickly, which is a huge market advantage for XTND’s clients as doing so can drive sales and bolster customer retention.

Claims bearing a high propensity for fraud are flagged and more than 80% of these are eventually repudiated, ensuring no undue claims leakage. 

As a result, XTND is the only organisation in SA that guarantees a positive cost-benefit ratio to its customers — that Veritas will prevent fraud losses far exceeding the cost of XTND’s solutions and services. 

Whistle-blowing evolved

The strength of our society rests on our ability to stamp out wrongdoing and keep the courageous people who expose it safe. That’s why ExposeIT, an anonymous reporting platform, has been white-labelled by several multinationals.

ExposeIT has become the world’s leading whistle-blowing app for following reasons: 

• It assures anonymity; it does not store any personal information and its users are untraceable.  
• It’s an incredibly easy-to-use and entirely customisable app. It’s accessible via mobile phone and allows for the upload of documents including videos, photos and voice notes, which are all stored securely on IBM’s secure cloud servers. 
• It records a full audit trail providing management information dashboards and allows examiners to work with the whistle-blower to build a strong case. 

Revealing hidden patterns in data

The biggest challenge for most businesses is to make sense of all their data. Multiple data sets, legacy systems, multiple touchpoints and data quality are some of the challenges making this a non-trivial task. 

The ExposeIT Crime Intelligence platform, powered by IBM i2, is a powerful tool to get enterprise-wide insights.

This platform allows for the near-instant identification of anomalies, such as syndicates targeting weaknesses in your processes, applications or controls, for instance. It can trace the flow of money and establish links between collaborators.  

But the platform has a much wider application: its ability to securely decipher intricate flows of information makes it perfectly suited to investigative work such as investigative journalism.

And its ability to tease out relationships between multiple data sets allows it to identify risky creditors or establish co-ordinated social media accounts, for example.   

Building better companies

Companies are often unwilling to take a proactive, preventive approach to security risks until it becomes an industry norm. That wait-and-see approach puts businesses squarely in the sights of criminal enterprises. 

XTND maintains fraud detection and IT security are not just tools to retroactively clean up a business — they can strengthen and grow it.

About the author: Servaas du Plessis is the CEO of XTND.

This article was paid for by EOH.