How collaboration and shared intelligence is crushing insurance crime
Collaboration and shared intelligence are among the tools that South African advice practices and product suppliers must leverage to have any hope of combatting rampant financial crime and fraud. The opening call to attendees at the ICB Annual Conference 2026 was to look for ways to be better at home and at work, and to go the extra mile to build a society that future generations will be proud of. And the advisers, brokers and insurance professionals among FAnews’ readership are well placed to respond.
Outpacing financial crime and fraud
This year’s Insurance Crime Bureau (ICB) conference was themed ‘Harnessing intelligence, technology and partners to outpace fraud’. CEO, Garth de Klerk welcomed a diverse audience to the two-day-long conference, labelling attendees a “fantastic community” that spanned associations, banks, educators, finance houses, insurers and law enforcement, to name a few. The bureau boasts 35 life and non-life insurers as main members, supported by five associate members; newcomers Netstar and Wesbank received special mention.
“We have a community of people outside of the licenced insurance industry that want to support us and be part of the fight against crime,” De Klerk said. The subtext was that insurance crime and fraud quickly filter through to other financial services firms and adjacent sectors, before impacting the broader community. A crime that starts with ‘fiddling’ an insurance contract expands to murder to trigger a claim, then to money laundering to hide the proceeds, and finally to bribes or more murders to derail a prosecution etc.
Humour was the order of the day, with the stand-out comedy observation from the introduction session being that fraudsters do not keep their money in a couch, but rather funnel it through bank accounts and investment houses, to eventually land up offshore. But it did not end there, as De Klerk announced South Africa’s crime-fighting alternative to the United States’ CIA: Collaboration, Intelligence and Action. The CIA is important because it is impossible to fight organised crime syndicates alone, or even together, in siloes.
R5.4 billion and counting
Key success indicators shared during the presentation illustrate the scale of the insurance crime and fraud problem, and suggest it is accelerating. Over the past decade the ICB has prevented or recovered amounts totalling R5.4 billion, including R4.45 billion for its insurance members. Around R442 million in vehicles were returned to uninsured individuals, and another R1.61 billion in vehicles were returned to members from the pounds, both values based on 40% of market value. The year-to-date ‘return ‘for life insurer members was estimated at over 15 times more than the prior year.
The 2026 conference put a spotlight on the socioeconomic factors driving crime. The audience was reminded of daily news flows filled with stories of corruption, crime, crumbling infrastructure and local governance failings, before told that the billions of rand lost to corruption could have been used to tackle poverty and improve education, healthcare, infrastructure and transport outcomes. Under this status quo, South Africans are stuck in an endless cycle of poverty and unemployment contributing to crime, including financial crime.
The challenge put to the audience was how to go beyond simply listing and complaining about the country’s challenges, to making a difference. Trust was offered as a valuable starting point, and De Klerk said that in his experience, trust had gone a long way to improving interactions between the ICB and various government departments. The private sector was, however, warned against trying to replace government. “We must look for ways to support government, to enable them, to capacitate them and to help them do things differently,” he said.
Factoring in the intangible costs
“The ICB’s approach to combatting crime or addressing these problems as a society is what you see in the room today; it is a collaborative approach through which we get together to design solutions that are going to make a difference,” De Klerk said. Another useful observation was that measuring financial crime and fraud went beyond the tangibles, such as the sums of money lost or recovered, or spent on prevention, to the intangibles, being the cost of leaving criminals and threat actors to do harm, or the benefits of removing them from society.
The CEO did not go into the specific mechanisms of tackling insurance fraud, but he did offer some useful comments. First, an industry-wide problem demands an industry-wide response; you cannot tackle financial crime in a bank- or insurer-only silo. “If we are wasting our time on false positives or, on old modus operandi, or old technologies, we are not going to be as effective as we would like to be,” De Klerk said. Second, you need centralised, shared data. Actionable intelligence is created by ‘sweating’ credible data.
FAnews readers will be quite familiar with the data and data protection concepts, having brushed up against beneficial ownership (BO); know your client (KYC); and, more broadly, responsibilities under South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). Advisers and brokers, including those working in tied roles at large banks and insurers, are often at the front line of questionable financial transactions; their alertness can make a huge difference in tackling financial crime.
The BO and KYC ‘sweat’
Under FAIS and the General Code of Conduct, intermediaries are expected to render financial services honestly, fairly, with due skill, care and diligence, and in the interests of clients and the integrity of the financial services industry. That obligation has obvious fraud-prevention overtones. BO declarations and KYC updates present opportunities for competent advisers to detect inconsistencies, as do claims conversations, renewal discussions or client onboarding exercises, including the financial needs analysis or site inspections.
Data-driven intelligence, in turn, drives industry discussions, investigations, reactions and, ultimately, results. To stand out in its pursuit of data and intelligence, the bureau is pressing ahead with its three strategic pillars. The first is ‘expanded evidence’ which revolves around growing brand awareness and membership; the second is stakeholder management across its members and law enforcement, legislators and other private bodies; and the third is digital modernisation by creating a stable and sustainable IT systems environment.
De Klerk explained that data aggregation was central to combatting insurance crime and fraud. The ICB sources claims and policy data from a wide range of sources, and then analyses that data “to detect syndicates that are creating trouble within the South African financial services sector.” The bureau also acts as a liaison between industry, law enforcement and legislators, and has, over time, concluded various MOUs to improve outcomes. Sensible MOUs translate to action, investigations, prosecutions and convictions.
The front-line shifts to AI
The front-line in combatting financial crime and fraud is pushing into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). Just days before the conference, your writer was alerted to yet another deepfake video trying to lure consumers into a questionable financial product, in this instance featuring local financial journalists Maya Fisher-French and Bruce Whitfield.
Generative AI is allowing financial fraud syndicates to take their nefarious activities to the next level, not just through massive cyberattacks at scale, but through the complexity and believability of scams directed at financial services employees. “The most important thing about AI is not the A, it is the I,” quipped De Klerk, bringing his presentation to a close. He celebrated the collective expertise and intelligence assembled in the conference hall, and their dedication in taking the fight to criminals and fraudsters, as just as important as the AI and tech boom.
Writer’s thoughts:
Many years ago, I visited a firm that was subsequently implicated in serious financial fraud; their parking lot was wall-to-wall Bentleys and supercars, which should have got me thinking. Do we do enough to notice and act on real-world signals of financial irregularity? Please comment below, interact with us on X at @fanews_online or email us your thoughts [email protected].
