28 November 2005

Detica, the specialist IT consultancy announced today that it has been awarded a contract on behalf of the UK insurance industry to help the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), a body being established in early 2006, to detect and investigate serious and organised claims fraud. The contract, which has a value of £3.4M and will run for up to five years, is being funded by a consortium of more than 20 UK insurers.

The contract is focusing on distributed claims fraud, through which organised criminals make multiple, fraudulent insurance claims across many insurers. Under the contract, Detica will apply a series of advanced, new data analysis techniques to detecting patterns of fraudulent behaviour in huge volumes of claims data supplied to the IFB by UK insurers. These new techniques have been developed in-house by Detica's own Technology Innovations Group.

The contract will be run as a managed service, with Detica supplying fraud intelligence on an ongoing basis to an external team of insurance fraud investigators.

Richard Davies, Fraud Risk Manager, AXA Insurance commented, "We selected Detica for the quality of their analytical approach after an extensive review of competing suppliers. The consultancy's specialism in intelligence systems and experience of fraud detection across a range of different markets meant that they were ideally qualified for the role."

Richard Love, Head of Detica's anti-fraud team commented, "We are delighted to have secured this groundbreaking fraud detection project which places us at the vanguard of fraud detection in the European financial services industry. Our fraud detection approach is extremely powerful and is already finding applications beyond the financial services market".

Coinciding with the contract signing, Detica has released results from a MORI poll exploring public attitudes towards insurance fraud. A key finding of the research is that while most people think that a proportion of a typical insurance premium does go towards paying for insurance fraud, most overestimate the amount. More than half (54%) believe that fraud adds more than 10% to premiums, including 40% of people who believe this figure to be over 20%. In fact, the true figure is just 3.75% (source: Association of British Insurers).

Many can identify reasons that they think others would use to justify committing insurance fraud, such as poverty and debt (9%) or looking for payback on policies which they have never claimed on (14%). This could suggest that insurance fraud is seen as acceptable by some. However, around half (53%) believe that organised crime has at least "a fair amount" of involvement in funding or benefiting from insurance fraud - and the majority (71%) think that people might be more inclined to report incidents of insurance fraud if they believed a strong link to organised crime existed.

About the research

Detica commissioned MORI to survey a representative sample of the GB population of 1,003 adults on behalf of Detica. Interviews, exploring attitudes towards different types of fraud - including tax, benefit, identity and insurance fraud as well as the sale of counterfeit goods - were conducted by telephone between the 14th and 16th October 2005. A full copy of the research is available upon request.

Edward Bridges or Matt DixonFinancial DynamicsTel: 0207 831 3113