The majority – 79 per cent – of UK-based senior bank executives say that working from home has had either a high or major impact on the effectiveness of financial crime prevention.

The results come from a poll commissioned by FICO, in which 110 people from banks around the world and who are involved in preventing crime, including anti-money laundering, were interviewed by research company OMDIA.

Globally, increased levels of false positives and increased volumes of fraud attacks have been the two most significant changes in tackling financial crime since the start of the pandemic.

This, the study says, could be down to changes in consumer behaviour, such as shopping online more. “Thus, while fraud attack volume did not increase uniformly across the sector, most institutions ended up with a higher investigation burden regardless”.

Remote working, globally, is the third biggest concern. FICO senior director for fraud Toby Carlin comments: “Just as the pandemic put huge stresses on the health care system, it put huge stresses on fraud and financial crime management teams.

“Teams that collaborate in person and work with large software systems that have restricted access found that working from home hurt their productivity. This was compounded as the volume of fraud attacks rose.”

This appears to be backed up by the results of a question asking what the biggest technology challenge is currently.

A total of 21 per cent of UK-based executives cited the impact of having multiple software systems involved in fraud management. The study also shows that 49 per cent of those asked worldwide placed it in the top three ranking of technology issues.

Carlin concludes: “Even though some 80 percent of the functions between fraud prevention software and AML software are the same,” says, “the systems are nearly always separate, and the teams are usually separate too. In our survey, 64 per cent of UK respondents said these teams don’t even report to the same person at the bank.”

And OMDIA points out that problems stemming from working from home are made worse by “generally enhanced consumer protection demands since the pandemic” from governments and regulators.