5 Tips to Build a Loss Prevention Framework to Protect Your Business in Today’s Times
All businesses are at risk of fraud, especially with no loss prevention strategy in place. A secure loss prevention framework can keep your business safe.
Businesses and startups are prone to fraud—both internally and externally. This increases the business's risk, especially if a loss prevention strategy is not in place. Fraud can damage a company’s reputation and lead to revenue losses.
A recent KPMG study found that companies are facing widespread losses from fraud. In fact, more than 67% of U.S. respondents said their business had faced external fraud in the last 12 months. This raises concerns over the safety and sustainability of a business. However, you can limit your business's exposure to fraud if you use the right tools and the right approach to protect your business.
Here are five useful tips to help you build a secure loss prevention framework to have maximum control over your business and its safety.
1. Identify Fraud Risks for Loss Prevention
Your fraud risk assessment is important, regardless of whether your company is big or small. It can comprehensively summarize all the weak links, risks, and threats your business might face. Based on the identified risks, you can create an asset protection strategy. Policies, quality control, and well-planned measures based on risk assessment will help with loss prevention.
This checklist will give you a complete overview of what risks your firm might face. Still, to get the most out of the fraud assessment, you must involve the entire management team from all departments.
Consider the following anti-fraud measures to protect your business and consumers:
Payments
When there’s money involved, there’s a high risk that it could get stolen. Whether it's buying or selling, using a company credit card, giving employees their monthly salaries, accepting credit or debit card payments, or basically any form of payment, all transactions have potential exposure to fraud.
Certainly, risk can arise from internal fraud or external threats such as hacks and thefts, where sending and receiving payment in cryptocurrency is also perilous. Secure your payments by partnering with a reliable payment processor. Change login credentials frequently and record transactions and emails containing confidential information.
User Accounts & Data
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses have a lot of user data that is sensitive and prone to hacking. Be careful about who has access to the data, store it securely, and use tools that give you easy options for managing risks.
Identifying risks early will give your firm a head start to thrive in today’s competitive professional world. So, once you identify the threats, you can move on to the next step: fixing the issues.
2. Leverage Dashboards to Identify Anomalies
As companies grow, the volume of data also increases. Traditional loss prevention methods, such as relying on an Excel sheet, won’t work anymore. There are more complex metrics to be considered. Regular fraud prevention methods become inefficient, time-consuming, and sometimes even prone to error.
Thanks to tech innovations; maintaining and managing risks has become quite easy. A customized dashboard and software can give you a holistic view to help with loss prevention. Services like Savi deliver “More Insights, Less Pain” by providing deep analytics and information from dashboards while keeping the interface user-friendly and easy to understand.
Some benefits of using a fraud management system or dashboard for your business include the following:
Simplifying Complex Fraud
With hackers using new tech, the traditional methods of identifying and fighting fraud are outdated. This is where a loss prevention dashboard can help. The dashboard contains features such as live video audits, complex analytics and reporting, and cloud-based applications. These insights can give you a deep data analysis.
Companies can also use machine learning dashboards to further enhance their decision-making skills. These dashboards can give you all the data and tools to preempt fraud before it happens.
Simply put, a dashboard can help your company simplify complex fraud and identify advanced hacking methods efficiently.
Real-Time Monitoring
One of the most important features of a loss prevention dashboard is the continuous monitoring of high-risk fraudulent activities. Traditional methods can fall short in comparison. Real-time monitoring manages internal and external data, transactions, employees, and databases. Coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, this can take your company’s security to the next level.
Since dashboards are mostly automated, there’s no need to hire a full-time employee to monitor security. The software does it all for you. Moreover, the risk of using dashboards to identify anomalies is low compared to human errors.
Quick Alerts
Whether the fraud is internal or external, dashboards can help you quickly identify and send alerts to the management and administration team. This reduces operational costs and cuts down on the need for manual inspection.
Alerts are an essential part of a fraud management system (FMS). For instance, fraud analysts can look at critical performance indicators and other important metrics and ascertain whether fraud detection targets are being met. When it comes to internal fraud monitoring, a fraud analyst can use the dashboard to review internal actions and determine whether an investigation is needed.
3. Look at High-Risk Events
Many businesses don’t understand the risks that come with fraudulent activity. This can not only hurt your bottom line, but it can also affect your firm’s image. Therefore, companies and business owners should be aware of high-risk events that may lead to fraud or security breaches. This clarity can help you better protect your assets, employees, consumers, and finances.
High-Risk Factors
High-risk factors can become a threat to your company’s sustainability. Look out for these common types of risks:
Revenue Skimming
This happens mostly with cash transactions. When a customer pays cash for a service or an item, an unscrupulous employee could pocket the funds and not issue a receipt. Without a proper paper trail, there would be no record of the item sold.
Payroll Fraud
This risk factor includes hourly workers reporting extra hours, salaried employees tampering with payroll records, and commissioned employees reporting false numbers of sales or orders. Anti-fraud control measures can help your company with loss prevention.
Fraudulent Invoicing
A business may send an inflated invoice for products that were never purchased. Always evaluate each invoice carefully and match them with the items or services received.
4. Find a Solution to Problems You Might Not Know Exist
A dashboard solution helps you stay ahead of the curve. For example, FiiZ, a local stop for treats and drinks, was suffering from preventable losses. A tool like Savi empowered them with intuitive and interesting solutions to their problem. After implementing the Savi system, Fiiz discovered the theft of thousands of dollars.
A fraud prevention dashboard provides several handy tools that are necessary to identify and eliminate theft from your company. Here are some benefits of using fraud prevention solutions:
Helps You Identify New and Upcoming Fraud Attacks
Hackers and fraudsters are always looking for an opportunity to exploit a person or company. However, if you have a fraud detection solution in place, catching new and unexpected attacks becomes easier. A solution that incorporates machine learning and AI will bring maximum benefit and value to your company.
Helps You With Better Management
Having businesses in multiple locations can make it harder for managers and CEOs to monitor everything. This creates space for scams and fraud, making the firm vulnerable.
The same was the case with Negril, which was managing multiple locations and wanted clear insights for better management. By working with Savi, they minimized their loss and also discovered negative employee practices that needed their attention. Read how Negril leveraged Savi to combat theft and help with employee training and development.
Stops Bots and High-Risk Attacks
Hackers will try to overload a server by sending in multiple bots to access and steal valuable user data. Tools with bot prevention features allow you to detect and prevent high-velocity attacks. You can also limit the attacks of brute logging, which can overload a website’s servers in an attempt to steal data.
Credit card details, addresses, loyalty points, and other personal information can be compromised. However, fraud prevention services will let you block those bots and avoid high-risk attacks.
5. Address Fraud and Security With Savi Solutions
A fraud prevention framework allows you to identify and make changes according to your business's vulnerability. This framework can help your business with loss prevention and bring you back to profitability.
Several businesses suffer losses even though they appear to be doing all the right things—often because of internal or external theft. To counter this situation, a solution like Savi lets you decrease losses and increase operational efficiency by providing features like the point of sale, service times data, live video, and much more. Contact Savi today to learn more.