Fighting Economic Crime Through Enhanced Verification

Data-driven solutions to verify UK businesses and prevent financial crime

Our Interim Paper

This paper provides an update on CFIT’s second coalition: Fighting Economic Crime Through Enhanced Verification. The coalition brings together over 70 leading financial, technology and regulatory institutions to develop a definitive verification solution for businesses that will enhance trust, empower SMEs and deliver growth.

The paper outlines the coalition’s findings to date, provides analysis of the current legislative and regulatory landscape and sets out the basis for delivering a scalable solution; a digital Company ID, that will prevent financial fraud

Download a copy of our Paper

Digital verification has the potential to safeguard against £3 billion in fraud losses but also to act as a catalyst for new financial and cross-sectoral services, adding to economic growth across the UK. For instance, adapting digital data verification across a range of products and services could deliver circa £800m per annum to the UK economy, amounting to a potential £4.8bn in value added from 2024-2030 (source: City of London’s Vision for Economic Growth report). For businesses, digital verification could save time and cost by avoiding duplicating data entry. For banks and other financial institutions, it enhances and potentially streamlines their client on-boarding and KYC / KYB processes.

We believe enhanced business verification could help streamline and strengthen existing processes, such as onboarding and payment verification. It will instill confidence and trust in the ecosystem, and act as a catalyst to unlock different use cases across sectors, including Open Finance. The coalition’s work will demonstrate how, by enhanced business verification, there would be positive outcomes and tangible benefits, such as cost and time savings, for banks and businesses alike. In the next nine months, we will develop a scalable proof of concept that would validate the impact and devise a plan for implementation in the UK.

High level timeline for Coalition 2 Delivery

Key Statistics on Fraud

According to the latest data from UK Finance, £1.17 billion was lost to fraud in 2023, with over 2.97 million cases. (source: UK Finance Annual Fraud report 2024.pdf)

Accounting for 64% of overall cases to the NFD (National Fraud Database), identity fraud remains the most dominant case type, with over 237,000 cases recorded in 2023. (source: Fraudscape 2024)

Fraud in all its forms continues to represent over 40 per cent of reported crime. (source: UK Finance Annual Fraud report 2024.pdf)

35% of businesses reported that they had been victims to Impersonations in emails or online (source: Cyber Security Breaches Survey)

Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud is the most common type of financial scam in the UK that leads to money being paid under false pretences. It has costed the UK economy over £450M in 2023 alone. (source: UK Finance Annual Fraud report 2024)

According to the latest data from UK Finance, there were 232,429 APP fraud cases recorded in 2023 and more than three-quarters (76%) of APP fraud originates online. 62% of all APP losses (amounted to £287.3M) returned to victims in 2023. (source: UK Finance Annual Fraud report 2024)

How your organisation will benefit from becoming a CFIT partner

At CFIT, we recognise the transformative potential of bringing ecosystem stakeholders and industry experts together to develop innovative propositions. We are committed to providing safe and secure commerce and payments for UK businesses and consumers. Through our collective efforts, we aim to counter financial crime through enhanced digital verification of businesses in financial services.

Becoming a CFIT partner will give organisations the opportunity to contribute to the discovery of solutions that will positively impact the lives of millions of UK consumers and SME business owners.

Smaller organisations will be able to drive innovation and internal development through collaboration with some of the UK’s brightest minds and by gaining access to the resources of large partner organisations.
Increase collaboration opportunities among financial institutions and UK Fintechs, and leverage commercial synergies across the wider financial services ecosystem.
Banks and other large institutions will access insights, research and industry knowledge form some of the UK’s leading innovators.
Academia will gain access to an environment in which they can test and further their research, and a space where they can incubate new concepts.

The CFIT Partner badge

The CFIT Partner badge identifies your organisation as a contributor to the critical work that is needed to unlock financial innovation scalability and drive UK growth.