NOTO: How Siloed Systems Create Opportunity for Insider Threats

Tristan Prince from NOTO and Robert Brooker of Opus Advisory Group recently sat down to discuss the growing complexities of fraud prevention in today’s financial landscape. Over the years, many firms have layered on various point solutions for application fraud, behavioural biometrics, and email risk, with each bringing its own costs and operational burdens. Eventually, managing these siloed systems becomes a full-time job in itself, making it nearly impossible to focus on the actual goal of stopping criminals.

The struggle is real and the data backs it up, as Prince notes that while over half of UK businesses plan to increase their fraud prevention spending, most also admit that risk levels are still climbing.

Interestingly, there seems to be a “bell curve” effect; once spending exceeds 10% of an IT budget, the effectiveness of identifying fraud actually starts to drop. Prince suggests that rather than adding another single-point solution, organisations should look toward enterprise fraud management platforms. By using a single API, companies can migrate their entire estate to a real-time rules engine and a unified case management view, finally getting all their customer data in one place.

Brooker brings the conversation toward the insider threat and the classic fraud triangle: motivation, rationalisation, and opportunity. When systems like accounts payable (AP) and supply chain management are siloed and don’t “talk” to each other, which creates gaps that people might exploit. Brooker shared a striking example of a contractor who managed to siphon off £250,000 in just 17 months simply because he could both create and approve his own invoices.

The organisation was completely in the dark until the banks flagged suspicious activity. 

Ultimately, NOTO argues that the true cost of fraud isn’t just the immediate financial hit; it’s the damage to customer trust. If a good customer gets caught up in clunky, outdated controls, they might just take their business elsewhere. With technology moving as fast as it is, and criminals using AI to lower their own cost of doing business, Prince and Brooker agree that the time to move away from 30-year-old legacy systems is now.