Peacocks uses data analysis to combat fraud

High street retailer Peacocks is to use data analysis software to pinpoint areas where it is losing money through internal fraud and administrative errors.

The company will go live next month with Fraud Alerter software from retail intelligence specialist Innovetra, to help its fraud prevention team target stores for further investigation of possible fraudulent activity.

'We are using this to flag up sales data not within normal parameters on a daily basis,' said Chris Miles, Peacocks operations director. 'The problem of fraud is so big for retailers, you'll never solve it completely. It's difficult to quantify. But this will give us visibility of where the problem is and what sort of mistakes are being made in the stores.'

Peacocks is writing algorithms setting out normal sales activity at its 420 stores.
Once that work is complete its five-strong team will be able to remotely access the browser-based software from laptops, to identify anomalies.

Miles says irregularities such as very large refunds or excessive use of the same credit card in a particular store could trigger the software to send alerts to the fraud team within 24 hours of a transaction taking place.

As well as boosting the company's ability to detect and tackle internal fraud, the new software is also expected to be able to identify areas of poor understanding where more training could help store management teams to eliminate errors.

'We want to create the sense in our store population that we can look at every anomalous transaction and investigate it,' he said.

'It's often the case that the willingness to carry out low-level fraud depends on the person's belief in their likelihood of getting caught.'