Increase in awareness of financial frauds in Middle Eastern financial institutions

ReadiMinds conducted a survey of Middle Eastern banks titled “State of Online Security in Financial Institutions in Middle East-2009”. The respondents were asked questions related to transaction security, real-time risk mitigation, and online financial fraud prevention.

According to the survey, the primary source of concern for Middle Eastern banks is internal fraud however there is a huge growth in external frauds. 75 percent of financial institutions consider their ability to fight online fraud as average. Most of the financial institutions take a channel-wise or fraud-wise approach to combat online frauds rather than taking a holistic financial crime surveillance approach across channels. 50 percent of the respondents are planning to take up the latter approach now. Respondents consider staff dissatisfaction, improper hiring practices, and easy access to technology/systems as the reasons behind online branch banking frauds. Further, 50 percent are concerned about authority misuse and unusual transactions on client accounts.

For official press release