As money is one of the most important things when it comes to keeping your business running, fraud could have a big impact on the day-to-day running of your company. Here are some of the ways you can reduce the chance of your business falling victim to such a crime.
Identify the risks
When it comes to protecting your own personal finances, there are some very simple rules to follow. Protect your wallet or purse at all times, don’t share your PIN or passwords with anyone and make sure you regularly change your credit cards to avoid them being cloned. When it comes to your company’s finances, the main problem is so many people have access to those finances. That means there can be multiple cards that have access to money in the account and a lot more transactions to keep track of every day. As everything you do in business poses a risk, it’s important that you put in place risk management strategies to combat any potential chance of fraud within your business. This includes everything from delegating certain responsibilities to certain people, implementing tools to protect systems and even creating a whistle-blower procedure to protect anybody who wants to report a problem within the business.
Reduce access to your finances and financial details
Once you’ve identified the risks and come up with a plan to reduce those risks, it’s time to let your whole workforce know about the plan to reduce the chance of fraud. While it’s important that all of your colleagues receive training on how to spot fraud attempts, it’s important that you keep the number of people with who you share your financial information to a bare minimum. To put it simply, the fewer people who know about your financial information, the less chance of someone using that information to commit fraud. It also reduces the opportunities for hackers to be able to steal this information. For example, although it’s highly recommended that you don’t do this, if a colleague was to either save their password to their account or email it to someone and either of those accounts were hacked, those passwords could be stolen. If only a couple of people in your business have the passwords for your accounts, it’s less likely that these passwords will be stolen and it’ll be a lot easier to track down the source of a data breach if the worst were to happen.
Change security details regularly
One of the most simple yet effective ways to protect your financial information is to simply keep changing the passwords that protect it regularly. If one of your security procedures was to leak out, and someone with malicious intent managed to get one of your passwords, they would only have access to your account for a short while if you change your password frequently.
This not only protects your accounts from hackers, but it may also prevent people who were given the password for a specific task trying to access your accounts once they’ve completed that task. Avoid using guessable systems when coming up with new passwords, for example “password1” followed by “password2” and then “password3”. Try and make each new password unique and completely different from the previous one.
