Watchout.....NZ Insurance fraud is on the rise

The Insurance Fraud Bureau https://ifb.org.nz/ estimated that $880M of fraudulent claims were made in 2023 and according to Yvonne Whnyard (Manager of IFB) there was a 22 % spike in the past 12 months. I wonder what 2024 holds for us?

Most notable was Yvonne's comment that spikes are seen during economically difficult times.

Fraud more widely mirrors this behaviour and economic hardship is only one of the drivers, however, unlike insurance fraud the opportunity extends far wider than a dodgy claim on a stolen car.

Anyone can start sending email scams and NZ businesses are being targeted more and more as the fraudsters know there is a good chance they can fool a busy accounts department. The value of these scams can range from tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands and it's common for it to be much higher. You can have the best processes and procedures in place but you need to use smart technology to save time for your finance team.

NZ banks are talking about working together but solving the name check issue is problematic, when it comes to their business customers who don't make payments as single transactions but rather as bulk payments.

Interestingly the large insurers have been working together for years to build a database to check the behaviour and volume of claims by individuals who will try it on with different insurers. 

The only equivalent when it comes to checking business names and bank account numbers is VigilantPay, a cloud-based service used by more and more NZ businesses to leverage the name and bank account numbers to validate payments, before they instruct the bank to make payment. This saves a lot of time and money on incorrect payments AND these same checks will stop fraud.

The beautiful thing with VigilantPay is that it is always on and available to quickly validate your payments in real-time. No days off or working at less than 100% because it has the flu, providing tangible confidence to those responsible for approving payments.