On Tuesday 2nd February, the Spanish Chamber held the seminar “Fraud: Managing the Risk to your Business” in collaboration with Haymarket Risk Management, member of the Chamber.
On this occasion, our Secretary General, Igor Urra, received attendees on behalf of our institution and introduced the speakers from Haymarket: Brian Mearns, Managing Director, Richard Kusnierz, Divisional Director Advanced Investigative Data Analytics and Geoff Chalder, Divisional Director International Crime.
From left to right, the speakers from Haymarket Risk Management: Richard Kusnierz, Divisional Director Advanced Investigative Data Analytics, Brian Mearns, Managing Director and Geoff Chalder, Divisional Director International Crime.
To kick off, Brian Mearns talked about the role played by Haymarket in order to help other companies to fight against fraud and revealed the three main aspects that compose a proper Fraud Response Plan, which would be covered during the session: prevention, detection and response and investigation .
After this brief introduction, Geoff Chalder went on to show attendees the size of the problem in the UK in terms of business losses and number of fraud incidents, as well as undetected fraud cases. Moreover, he explained the impact and damage caused in business reputation due to these practices and mentioned some of the main existing threats, such as payroll fraud, procurement fraud, theft of goods or money and bribery and corruption.
Regarding these threats, Brian Mearns discussed real cases where internal employees and known relationships were involved; demonstrating how difficult is for companies to be aware of fraud existence.
The organizers of the seminar: Haymarket Risk Management and the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain.
After that, Richard Kusnierz explained the two first stages of the Fraud Response Plan: prevention and detection. In this sense, he emphasized that it is essential to understand the data and evidence available by having a pre-screening of employees and business partners as well as an internal audit and controls.
To conclude the seminar, Haymarket’s Managing Director Brian Mearns focused on the response and investigation stage after the existence of fraud has been detected. He also commented on the relevant aspects about data protection in both the United Kingdom and the European Union before summing up the main topics the different speakers had covered.
The event then moved on to the Q&A session, where the representatives of Haymarket responded to all the questions from the attendees. Once the session finished, participants could enjoy an interactive networking breakfast while sharing thoughts and discussing further all the ideas covered in the talk.
Once the talk had finished, attendees had the opportunity to network and exchange their opinions about the session.
If you want to find out other activities that the Spanish Chamber of Commerce is organising, we encourage you to keep an eye on our UPCOMING EVENTS section within our website. In addition to this, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter in order to receive updates with our events.