How to address your repeat fraud offender problem

Helping the Utilities Sector save over £3 million in just 3 months by cutting fraud

The UK boasts a highly efficient and successful water industry, one that leads the way in research, training and accessing new water sources. Providing essential energy, water, sanitation and drainage to all households, businesses and organisations up and down the UK, the social responsibilities of utility providers are paramount. As part of their social obligations, all providers offer social tariffs to ensure domestic customers have access to a discounted service should they be struggling financially. This significant payment reduction is a lifeline for those who genuinely need it, protecting them from entering debt and ensuring continued provision of such essential services. However, these social tariffs can be abused and many customers are mistakenly or fraudulently receiving reduced charges when they are not entitled to them. A PROBLEM FOR PUBLIC SERVICE PROVIDERS To identify the scale of this problem Synectics Solutions worked with Sagacity and a number of the UK’s water companies in 2019 over a period of three months. The water utility providers it worked with covered rural and inner-city areas of the UK. Each of the companies in the pilot were experiencing problems such as: Customers dishonestly obtaining discounted services Failing to declare residency to avoid paying for their service entirely Declining to update their provider when their circumstances changed Without the intelligence in place to flag these potentially fraudulent claims or errors, these companies were exposed to considerable fraud and error and millions in lost revenue. The method that these organisations were deploying previously to address this problem involved using credit reference agency (CRA) data. The annual cost of these procedures for each company was several million pounds annually, and yet the problem continued to be an issue. "One of the reasons this fraud was not being identified through these measures was because a customer’s claim for a discounted service, or a zero-rated account, cannot be accurately verified through credit reference agency matching alone.” “This process in isolation doesn’t provide the data landscape needed to find the explicit qualifying criteria to confirm a genuine claim.” A POWERFUL PARTNERSHIP IN FRAUD PREVENTION To address this problem Synectics Solutions and Sagacity worked with the UK Government’s Cabinet Office and took the opportunity to use the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) intelligence database to help these companies understand and identify the scope of fraud or error that they were suffering. The NFI provides an invaluable database of up-to-date insights and offers 19 different data sets against which to match. This vast solution has already helped over 1200 public sector organisations to identify over £1.7 billion in savings from fraud and error.

How you can speed up your customer boarding without compromising your risk checks

Hear from one of the leading insurers who improved the speed at which they could board genuine customers without compromising on their risk checks, with our Intelligence Hub. Driving down the cost of risk, improving compliance and the customer journey. Ensuring that customer on-boarding or application and claims processing is as frictionless as possible is an essential ingredient when trying to improve risk and compliance checks. To achieve this, risk analysis solutions need to be able to integrate and communicate with a company’s wider decision systems. Applying real-time configurable business logic to data processing is one function of The Intelligence Hub (part of Synectics’ risk management, financial crime and fraud prevention platform) that is helping one of Synectics Solutions’ insurance clients to integrate its fraud prevention solution (SIRA) with its wider customer decision platforms. Outcome Orchestration is allowing the insurer to create a much more sophisticated, efficient and strategically aligned risk mitigation solution. SITUATION This major insurer first deployed Synectics Solutions’ fraud prevention and detection application (SIRA) in 2013. Since the initial deployment the company benefited from SIRA’s effectiveness and derived marked improvements in its working practices and fraud strategy in the claims space. This helped the organisation save significant amounts of revenue by preventing fraud losses. The company’s SIRA solution was configured to deliver real-time alerts to its fraud management team. These alerts were then prioritised and screened for accuracy using Precision – Synectics Solutions’ predictive analytics and data science service. Due to a growth in customers, the insurer needed to realign its fraud and risk strategies and improve its ability to meet its commercial clients’ compliance thresholds. To achieve this the insurer introduced Outcome Orchestration (part of the Intelligence Hub from Synectics Solutions), to enhance and improve its fraud management capabilities.