The global pandemic has thrown the biggest economic crisis for decades in the face of all human organisations, in just a few weeks. Most governments, business leaders, investors and economists didn’t foresee the unprecedented scale of the downturn. The economic impact of the Covid-19 has ripped through the global markets, destroying businesses, shutting down global supply-chains and wiping out trillions of stock market value.
Negative oil prices turn the world upside down, airlines are seeking bailouts from governments, major conglomerates are bleeding cash, entire industries are suffering, millions of workers are jobless. The crisis is still on-going, the after-crisis moment hasn’t even started yet. The dust hasn’t settled. The damages to the economy will be incommensurable.
Businesses are in survival mode at the moment. Business continuity plans are in action, online remote working platforms are vastly adopted. Trying to keep the business afloat is the number one priority. This is the one time where extreme focus on survival risks impeding strategic vision and risk management. The time where the fog of war makes us miss direct threats coming at us. The time where, in fact, we are the most exposed.
The surge in Covid-19 related financial crime has been widely reported recently, from opportunistic cyber-attacks to elaborate external fraud schemes. Organisations, from companies to fund managers to hospitals have been victims of successful financial crime attacks.
We believe that there is no magic formula for financial crime risk management, and the starting point of any realistic defence strategy remains very simple: it’s first about your context.Your business context. Understand it, analyse it deeply. Identify the threat environment. Scan it. Find the weak points. Detect the blind spots. Get to know what you don’t know using a scenario-based threat assessment method. And start fixing the gaps in your lines of defence.
This is what we do. There is no silver bullet to countering threats to your business. There is no off-the shelf solution waiting to be patched to your systems. In these times where your business has gone almost entirely remote working, it is important to assess your exposure to financial crime. Now is the time to outsmart the fraudsters coming at you.