Mrs Margaret Mwanakatwe, MD of the bank, welcoming participants, said the event was one of the major focuses set up for the year to enhance its relationship with its customers as well as ensuring that together, "We are on the right path towards a very successful year".

She stressed that the success and very existence of Barclays as a bank was extricably linked to the security and safety as a business, not only in terms of developing a buffer against fraud and other malfeasances, but also in the soundness and sustainability of the business in which customers are engaged.

She said increasing complexity of financial structures, globalisation and technological changes have combined to give opportunities for new and more sophisticated methods of frauds.

The objective of the seminar, she said, was therefore to assist valued customers of the bank to develop a proactive approach to minimising the risk of fraud and improving upon their business risk profile. It is also to equip them to be able to prevent recurrence of fraud if they have been unfortunate to have had that experience already.

"The consequences of fraud on businesses - banks, staff, shareholders, customers and the society at large", she observed, " are so unpleasant that there is the need to discuss fraud openly and extensively, and this is what we seek to achieve".

Deputy head of Banking Supervision, Bank of Ghana, Mr Dela Selormey in his keynote address defined fraud as, " the abuse of trust or the subversion of normalcy for gain". This, he said implies a situation whereby an individual abuses the trust placed in him or her by someone to cheat.

Mr Selormey said that it was essential to distinguish errors from fraud, saying, errors are mistakes committed in the course of one's duty due to lack of diligence, skill and care that are reasonably necessary under the circumstances.

He categorised fraud that we are confronted with into two broad categories of Internal and Organised fraud which are acts perpetrated by employees.

The second type he said was External in which persons outside the institution or third parties either alone or in collusion with insiders, commit these types of fraud which include international money transfers or forgery through international monetary instruments such as traveller's cheques and wire transfers.

To commit an act of fraud, a person must have the motivation to do so. The potential fraudster must possess credibility, that is he or she must be trusted and in addition must have access to the subject of fraud and the opportunity must present itself.

Fraud, he went on, could divert people's capabilities from productive activity into unproductive crime and thus serve as a disincentive to work with likely adverse consequences to the economy.

He cited manipulation of computer hardware and alteration of data on software as among types of fraud and economic crimes which our financial institutions are subjected to on a daily basis.

Many notable initiatives, internationally, have been adopted in the past to deal with these economic crimes, saying though the initiatives have achieved some measure of success, the incidence of economic crimes continues to escalate, causing huge losses to nations and the international financial system.

Banks, he stressed are well positioned to combat crime through effective fraud risk management practices, failure of which the banks could be accused of facilitating fraudsters.

It is in line with this, he stressed, that the Bank of Ghana welcomed the organisation of this seminar by Barclays Bank Ghana Limited to underscore their strong opposition to all forms of commercial fraud.

The Central Bank on its part is not resting on its oars in the fight against fraud and related crimes in the country's financial institutions.

Mr Dan Opare, Security and Investigations manager of Barclays Bank took participants through a presentation on Developing a Fraud Resilient Management System.