After a year of living with the pandemic, it’s inevitable that working practices have shifted. Home working has become the norm for many, and there is a strong possibility it is here to stay in some form, regardless of the end to lockdown.

Some banks and lenders have already announced home working is the future, with Nationwide’s 13,000 staff told they can work wherever they want.

With this trend set to stay, at least for some, there has been concern about the dangers of working from home. Particularly when it comes to defending against fraud and money laundering.

A recent study of 110 UK senior bank executives discovered the vast majority say that working from home has had a major impact on the effectiveness of financial crime prevention.

The results come from a poll commissioned by FICO, in which staff from banks who are involved in preventing crime, were interviewed by research company OMDIA.

Remote working is high on the agenda in terms of looking at work life balance after lockdown eases. However, there are fears that the switch will leave some lenders exposed.

Discussing the findings of the report, FICO senior director for fraud Toby Carlin commented: “Just as the pandemic put huge stresses on the health care system, it put huge stresses on fraud and financial crime management teams.”

These concerns should be unfounded. While the pandemic has certainly seen a rise in attempted fraud and money-laundering, working from home should not prevent lenders from properly vetting customers.

The issues lie with outmoded methods of ID verification when onboarding customers. That is where the change needs to come.

With the increase in forgeries of hard copy documents, such as passports and driving licences – and the level of sophistication of these fakes – electronic verification should be the standard for preventing money laundering and fraud. It’s an entirely secure and as it is an online solution, it can be carried out anywhere, including at home.

Not only is electronic verification both quicker and more effective, the checks can be completed easily while working remotely. To properly on-board a new customer, or an existing one, just a name and a date of birth is needed.

From just these simple details, the latest technology can combine credit reference data, biometric facial recognition, and digital fraud checks as well as electoral roll data and other reliable public sources to establish identity.

By triple checking these different sources of information a unique ‘composite digital identity’ is produced. This digital identity is virtually impossible to fake. All this can be done online, with no need for in-person meetings, face coverings or hard copies of documents.

Lenders can be up and running with a full one-stop-shop electronic AML platform that partners with the world’s best data suppliers in 24 hours, and it is easy for those working from home to access and use the platform.

The pandemic has forced a lot of introspection and review of the ways we operate. Anti-money laundering procedure should certainly be an area that lenders look to make as efficient as possible.

While there is clearly concern about the dangers of allowing staff to work from home, it should actually present an opportunity for lenders to make the switch to electronic verification, and become more efficient and better protected against the threat of money laundering.

John Dobson is CEO of SmartSearch