Deloitte urges united front to tackle rising banking fraud
The Africa Partner for Risk, Regulatory and Forensics at Deloitte, Dr Antonio Pooe, has underscored the urgent need for collective action in the fight against banking fraud, describing it as a global menace that requires coordinated strategies.
Speaking at a webinar organised by Deloitte Ghana on the theme “Banking Sector Fraud: How We See It and What Can Be Done”, Dr Pooe warned that fraudsters are constantly evolving their methods, often working in networks and sharing information across borders.
He urged banks, regulators and financial institutions to emulate this model of collaboration by sharing intelligence and adopting joint approaches to frustrate fraudsters.
“Social engineering is certainly something that remains an issue. Banking customers suffer at different levels with this level of pressure in a creative way to solicit information. And certainly, forgery remains a problem across the board. Document manipulation and the use of technology in one way or the other. So that is a problem,” Dr Pooe explained.
He stressed that while the techniques have shifted over the years, the underlying crimes remain consistent.
“In the past, people forged physical documents. Today, the same forgery is happening electronically. The principle is the same, the medium has just changed. That is why I go back to a point made earlier, that we need to make fraudsters’ lives difficult. I agree 100 percent,” Dr Pooe noted.
He drew attention to the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence by criminals to carry out sophisticated fraud schemes.
Dr Pooe cautioned that fraudsters now require only a few seconds of a person’s voice to create synthetic audio, which can be used to trick banks’ biometric systems and gain access to accounts.
Similar risks exist with video replication, posing new threats to customer authentication processes.
“We really need to think outside the box in terms of how we interact with technology as banks, and how we educate the public to interact with technology safely,” he said, emphasising that awareness creation must remain central to fraud prevention.
Dr Pooe stressed that: “Phishing, forgery, document manipulation, and now synthetic AI are real threats. Banks need to prepare customers to recognise and avoid these traps.”
The Deloitte Partner added that building resilience requires not only stronger systems and technology but also empowered and well-informed customers who can detect fraud attempts before they succeed.
The webinar also featured insights from Eric Cab-Beyuo, Head of the Fraud Compliance and Reporting Unit at the Bank of Ghana; Dr Kwabena Situ, Assurance Partner at Deloitte Ghana; Patrick Baah Abankwa, Head of Member Experience and Growth at the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Ghana; and Charlotte Forson-Abbey, Financial Services Industry Leader and Audit Partner at Deloitte Ghana.
Collectively, they agreed that addressing fraud requires a multi-stakeholder approach, with banks, regulators and customers all playing key roles.
