The Government has taken steps to use an anti-fraud technology used in the financial services sector.
The Cabinet Office has signed a call-off contract, valued at £362,000 over a year from July, from the G-Cloud framework with data and analytics software company Quantexa for the use of its Contextual Decision Intelligence platform.
This follows increasing worries about a surge in fraud against the Covid-19 business loans scheme and other forms of financial support during the pandemic.
A pilot is set to run until March of next year involving up to 10 users in the Cabinet Office and up to 30 from other government bodies handling business and grants data. It will take in Companies House payments data on high risk entities and National Crime Agency serious and organised crime flags.
Quantexa said this will enable government bodies to handle data at a level impractical for manual processes to reveal hidden connections and relationships between people and organisations and pinpoint suspicious activities for investigation.
The Cabinet Office’s contract notice said it needed a fraud and intelligence capability that allows customers to upload data, assess its quality, resolve any issue with entities and link it networks for indexing and scoring.
Users can either download outcomes or interact through a web based investigation and triage tool.
The technology is already used in the anti-fraud departments of banks including HSBC and Standard Chartered.
Company chief executive officer Vishal Marria said: “The Covid loan schemes were designed to help the nation at a time of deep economic need, and we are honoured our Contextual Decision Intelligence technology is supporting the UK Government’s tenacious efforts to fight fraud.”
Image from iStock, Gunay Mutlu
