Combating fraud continues to be a major challenge in the UK. Last year, over £1.3bn was stolen by fraudsters in the UK in 2021, according to Feedzai. However, technology is still making a change.
Quantexa, a data and analytics software company, has released a report that explores how technology is helping the UK government crackdown on fraud.
The UK parliament recently introduced the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. This aims to reform how the Companies House and UK Law Enforcement Agencies operate in the future, with the aim of combating fraud.
Quantexa stated that Companies House has provided frictionless company formation to support a dynamic and growing economy. However, this has allowed anyone to register a company.
It highlighted that at the end of March 2021 the total register size was 4.7 million, which is an increase of 8.4% compared with the end of March 2020. Additionally, in 2020/2021 there were 810,316 company incorporations, which was an increase of 21.8% on the previous year. Last year was also the largest number of incorporations to date.
The RegTech company stated that the register has suffered from data-quality issues and companies being set up to front fraudulent or illicit activities. This was especially the case during the Covid-19 pandemic when companies could easily apply for support schemes.
“Until now, Companies House has not had the legal framework or mandate to improve the integrity of the register or prevent companies being incorporated to front illicit activities. However, this could be about to change.”
This new Bill will transform the legislation to become better at fighting fraud.
It will improve the integrity of the register to ensure the quality of data is improved and can be amended or removed. It will also give Companies House the mandate to verify individuals when they register to prevent illicit organisations entering the system.
The bill will also give UK Law Authorities the power to seize crypto assets. It will also allow cross-intelligence sharing to better investigate companies and limited partnerships will have tighter registration requirements, including having to maintain closer ties to the UK.
The role of technology
Quantexa stated that technology will accelerate the operationalisation of the Bill in many ways.
One of these is creating the right data foundation. It said, “Maintaining the integrity of the register can only be achieved by joining multiple datasets to get the full context of individuals or companies.
“Traditional data-matching techniques struggle to scale and have poor accuracy rates. Entity Resolution helps organisations supercharge their data-matching requirements by unifying internal and external data (like Companies House datasets) and overcoming data-quality issues to create a true single view.”
Another way it helps is by giving operators network analytics technologies. These will allow them to make sense of masses of internal and external datasets to identify hidden risk and connections.
Technology will also help companies become operational in a fully explainable way. It stated that technology will need to be built on open standards with fully auditable components, this will ensure decisions are audited, ethical and transparent.
Read the full report here.
Earlier in the year, Quantexa announced it has recorded a 144% net retention rate and 70% increase in committed ARR in its full year fiscal 2022 performance.
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