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Johannesburg - Deloitte’s Forensic Centre has issued a report that looks at the growing use of visual analytic tools and techniques to detect and reduce corruption, fraud and waste in an enterprise.
While we now receive and accumulate more information than ever before, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and often remain hidden, said Deloitte.
“Yet, in the realm of fraud detection for example, the ability to reveal relationships, communications, locations and patterns can make the difference between uncovering fraud at an early stage and having it grow into a major incident.”
Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques to detect and reduce corruption and fraud.
From money-laundering schemes to bribery violations, from manipulating financial statements by reporting fictitious revenues to inappropriate purchases using p-cards, graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.
Visual analytics can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story, said Graham Dawes, risk advisory director at Deloitte.
“Visual analytics builds on humans’ natural ability to absorb a greater volume of information in visual than in numeric form and to perceive certain patterns, shapes and shades more easily than others,” he said.
“Visual representations such as word clouds, which display words in a size that reflects their frequency of use and social networking diagrams, which indicate relationships within a given community, are good examples of expressing complex data in a form that can be understood intuitively.”
Using mathematical techniques to evaluate patterns and outliers, effective visuals can translate multidimensional data such as frequency, time, and relationships into an intuitive picture.
While financial services companies are at the forefront of using visual analytics techniques to combat money laundering, conduct trading analyses, and perform continuous monitoring, their use in other industries is growing as internal audit and compliance functions are often being asked to enhance risk management effectiveness but with fewer resources.
The growing diversity of uses is matched by the variety of visual analytics techniques available, and while this type of data analysis was once reserved for a small number of highly trained specialists, recent software advances have made it available to a far wider range of people, including compliance officers, internal auditors, and operations personnel.
“New visual analytics tools and techniques can enable compliance personnel, risk managers and others to do more with less by helping to identify previously hidden patterns, said Dawes.
“Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.”
While we now receive and accumulate more information than ever before, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and often remain hidden, said Deloitte.
“Yet, in the realm of fraud detection for example, the ability to reveal relationships, communications, locations and patterns can make the difference between uncovering fraud at an early stage and having it grow into a major incident.”
Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques to detect and reduce corruption and fraud.
From money-laundering schemes to bribery violations, from manipulating financial statements by reporting fictitious revenues to inappropriate purchases using p-cards, graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.
Visual analytics can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story, said Graham Dawes, risk advisory director at Deloitte.
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“Visual analytics builds on humans’ natural ability to absorb a greater volume of information in visual than in numeric form and to perceive certain patterns, shapes and shades more easily than others,” he said.
“Visual representations such as word clouds, which display words in a size that reflects their frequency of use and social networking diagrams, which indicate relationships within a given community, are good examples of expressing complex data in a form that can be understood intuitively.”
Using mathematical techniques to evaluate patterns and outliers, effective visuals can translate multidimensional data such as frequency, time, and relationships into an intuitive picture.
While financial services companies are at the forefront of using visual analytics techniques to combat money laundering, conduct trading analyses, and perform continuous monitoring, their use in other industries is growing as internal audit and compliance functions are often being asked to enhance risk management effectiveness but with fewer resources.
The growing diversity of uses is matched by the variety of visual analytics techniques available, and while this type of data analysis was once reserved for a small number of highly trained specialists, recent software advances have made it available to a far wider range of people, including compliance officers, internal auditors, and operations personnel.
“New visual analytics tools and techniques can enable compliance personnel, risk managers and others to do more with less by helping to identify previously hidden patterns, said Dawes.
“Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.”
The need for visual analytics
- Fin24
