ARTICLE...
Fighting fraud across Europe
The European Commission wants to promote better working relationships – to provide a smoother exchange of information and to help combat fraud.
The latest global surveys on fraud polled more than 800 senior executives from a broad range of industries and – of the respondents – 88% reported they had been hit by at least one kind of fraud in the last year under review. This was consistent across all areas – and with previous years.
Fraud is a old adversary in the credit community and, with individuals moving more and more, the scale has increased – to continental or even even global levels. And, with criminals now operating more regularly across borders, the need to share data has been highlighted as even more important.
Most countries seem to accept that data sharing has significant benefits at a macro economic, organisational and consumer level.
As early as 2004, the Commission outlined its views on battling fraud. Nowadays, it sees itself as a catalyst in the process of preventing fraud, working to promote better information exchange and stronger cross-border cooperation.
Effectively, the organisation now wants the rules on data protection to be clarified and harmonised across the EU. Information should be quickly and simply exchanged to detect fraudulent activity – while still respecting the rights of individuals and rules surrounding competition.
The Expert Group on Credit Histories (EGCH) was established by the Commission in 2009 with the objective of identifying solutions to optimise the circulation of credit data within the EU, taking into account a broad range of issues – from data protection to consumer rights.
Two of the observations from this report were that data protection authorities must work towards converging or harmonising the interpretation of data protection rules and – critically – fraud prevention was a legitimate purpose for sharing data, subject to consumer transparency.
The manner in which these findings are implemented is still being decided, but there is at least a desire to bring in data sharing – and an understanding that it is critical to the establishment of a single European market.
The Single Market Act sets out 50 proposals to make the market more efficient and easier to work in. The difficult thing will now be convincing the individual countries to accept this new approach.
Although credit bureaux and independent solutions providers have data sharing products and services in place, these are often overshadowed by the overly strict conditions concerning data in the individual countries. So even if the products and services are solid, they are only as good as the regulators in charge allow them to be.
One positive is that, in terms of fraud data sharing, the UK was ahead of the pack, but many members are still hampered by local data protection laws – including ones in some countries that require the fraudster's consent to share their details!
Original article courtesy of CCR.
