Stop Christmas coming early for fraudsters

London, 8th December 2005 – UK retailers, which can achieve up to 40% of their annual sales in the last quarter of the year, will see their losses rise as they take on more full and part time staff for Christmas, says loss prevention solution provider, IntelliQ.

Shrinkage due to staff and customer theft, wastage and administrative errors cost UK retailers on average 2-3% of their annual turnover. This in turn can equate to as much as 25% of annual profits. Proof of the scale of the problem comes from the latest European Retail Theft Barometer (ERTB) 2005 – total shrinkage cost UK retailers €5,918m.

“However, fraud is just the tip of the iceberg” says David Snocken, Product Development Director of IntelliQ. Snocken continues “Unintentional loss, the honest errors that occur wherever there are people, is a much larger problem costing retailers tens of millions of pounds a year – after all, it applies to every employee, not just the dishonest few.”

“The answer,” says David Snocken “is to use a new generation of analytic solution to sift through the 100s of millions of EPOS transactions generated and identify the patterns of error and fraud.”

Snocken continues, “This level of loss no longer needs to be an acceptable cost of doing business, new analysis tools can sift through these detailed EPOS transactions and identify the signatures of error and fraud and allow rapid action to be taken”.

At Christmas, the problem can only get worse for retailers as they staff up by as much as 15% of the store workforce, particularly as they take on staff who cannot be vetted and who may have no previous retail experience.

IntelliQ has implemented loss prevention systems in a number of retailers, which have delivered significant savings in the first year and continuous gains thereafter.

RetailKey Loss Prevention is IntelliQ’s Loss Intelligence solution that supports the loss elimination efforts of some of Europe’s most successful retailers. By automatically analysing EPOS data – alone or in combination with a wide variety of other data sources – RetailKey LP spots the signatures of loss across the entire landscape. It then helps investigators, analysts and operational staff find the root cause of the loss quickly and reliably.

Copyright © IntelliQ 2007