With National Identity Fraud Prevention Week drawing to a close, once more the spotlight is put on how consumers can be protected from ID theft. While individuals should remain extremely vigilant against the threat posed by fraudsters, banks themselves need to work more closely with their customers and educate them to help themselves.

As financial institutions offer more sophisticated banking options to their customers, it is critical that they continue to take a complete view of all their customer activity in order to effectively protect those customers from identity theft. Anti-fraud solutions should be applied across all transaction channels and used to share information between different departments and channels as well as provide an overview of a customer’s activity across all of their accounts within the bank.

What’s more, cases of phishing attacks and hackers attacking customers’ email and bank accounts are occurring on a regular basis. Only last week, it emerged that more than 30,000 people became victims of a key-logging attack whereby malicious software collects information about keystrokes, such as the password for an online bank account, and then sends that data back to a hacker. It is true, however, that banks are increasingly looking for ways to reduce these levels of fraudulent activity through tools such as IP Intelligence. That way, financial institutions have the ability to monitor transactions based on customers’ IP addresses, thereby establishing patterns in their online banking behaviour as it is occuring.

What Identity Fraud Prevention Week should remind us of is that fraud detection and reduction is one area where financial institutions can take decisive and positive action to reduce losses. Crucially, it provides an opportunity for banks to educate their customers about fraud, protect their own image and retain the trust of their customers.