Public Funding for Cifas

Approximately 75% of UK adults use online banking and the value of UK website retail-sales is over £300Bn. Key to enabling UK productivity is reducing the growth in online crime. Identity fraud is growing, hundreds of thousands of incidents and billions of pounds of financial losses each year. Total (financial and other) losses borne by the private sectors (banks, retailers, utilities, etc) are estimated at tens of billions of pounds. The biggest societal impact of identity fraud is borne by individual citizens, from financial concerns, worry, lost time etc. The goal of this project is to develop a digital platform, adopted by thousands of banks, loan-providers, financial-service businesses, retailers and others, that allows individuals (via a mobile App) to prevent someone else opening an account in their name. Based upon the high levels of know-how built-up by Cifas over 30 years, we develop and deploy fraud-prevention products across multiple sectors. We enable businesses to work together to beat fraud. Our Partners are two exemplar financial-services businesses. One of UK's most successful new banks, and an exemplar high-growth small financial-services SME. Given the mission to protect individual citizens, associates include leading citizens' organisations.