Scammers are increasingly organised and sophisticated, while technological advancements in areas like generative AI are helping them scale and personalise their attacks. It’s not a fair fight – they only need to be successful once, whereas an organisation’s security mechanisms must succeed every time to avoid catastrophic consequences.
That’s why “collaborative cybersecurity” is a term we use a lot here at Eftsure. It’s the idea that no single government, sector, organisation or individual can clear these disadvantages on their own. Instead, we all have to collaborate on multilayered solutions.
We’ve been pursuing this approach with Australia’s largest financial institutions. As part of those efforts, Eftsure has been working with Westpac to help businesses with their payment fraud prevention strategies.
Over the past year, Eftsure and Westpac have hosted joint conferences and lunch-and-learns and spoke to over 600 joint business customers, explaining the efforts that both businesses put in place to mitigate the risk of payment fraud for corporate Australia.
These events focus on helping finance professionals understand the ever-changing risks and tactics of digital fraudsters. But they also break down practical steps for minimising those risks and protecting business payments.
“We’re excited about the partnership with Westpac, and applaud the bank for taking the extra initiative to educate their customers about payment fraud,” says Justine McFarlane, Eftsure’s Head of Partnerships. “At Eftsure, we know that education is half the job done. We’re looking forward to continuing this important work with Westpac and provide more fraud prevention technology to their business customers.
Most organisations have some sort of safeguards in place to thwart fraud. Unfortunately, scammers are always adapting to these safeguards and technology is helping them do it at scale.
With busy workloads and tight budgets, it’s understandable that finance teams don’t always have the time to constantly think
one step ahead of hypothetical scammers. But that lack of awareness is what can expose organisations to major financial losses and reputational damage.
For instance, Eftsure research found that – despite 90% of finance leaders saying that they’re worried about rising cybercrime – many organisations aren’t using basic anti-fraud controls. And less than half of respondents (47%) say their organisation uses an anti-fraud strategy developed with IT or security specialists.
Eftsure leaders have spoken publicly about the need for collaborative cybersecurity, including urging the federal government to adopt similar approaches in the recently released national cybersecurity strategy. And we’ve been putting the concept into practice – recently, Eftsure announced collaborations with NAB, HSBC and ANZ.
“The partnership with Westpac is part of our industry collaboration initiative at Eftsure. We believe that businesses, government, and banks need to come together to solve business payment fraud as joint initiative. As a technology provider with over 2,000 business customers of various sizes, we’ve learned a lot about the problems these businesses experience to mitigate fraud. We hope more banks will join us in the future.” – Justine McFarlane, Head of Partnerships at Eftsure
To effectively combat cybercrime and scams, finance leaders need to strengthen three key areas: people, processes and technology. Training and education are critical for that first component.
One way to do that is through regular educational events led by industry specialists with the latest understanding of digital fraud and cyberattacks.
Eftsure is a market leader in payment fraud prevention. Specifically designed for businesses, the end-to-end solution safeguards more than $216b in B2B payments per year. The fraud alerts are available in many online banking environments, including Westpac’s online banking screen.
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End-to-end B2B payment protection software to mitigate the risk of payment error, fraud and cyber-crime.
