Like any organization in the midst of digital transformation, corporate treasury departments are seeing a rise in cybercrime, including payment fraud, social engineering, and account takeover attacks.

The holiday season is the most wonderful time of year for cybercriminals. This year, holiday season cyberattacks are on pace to increase by nearly 60%. And though Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, consumers and businesses need to remain alert. In 2017, the highest spike in fraud took place after Christmas, as cyber criminals continued to target shoppers pursuing post-holiday deals.

Heading into the new year, everything from your washing machine to your mobile banking app will be a potential source of fraud risk. It’s the challenge of living and doing business in the age of digital transformation. As our day-to-day lives becomes more convenient through all that technology has to offer, fraud becomes simpler for cyber criminals.

Countless articles have been written about the techniques cybercriminals use to harvest personal information and about ways to prevent online identity theft. However, less attention has been given to the economic engines that grease the wheels of financial cybercrime. Fraudsters have realized that the dark web provides a full cloak of anonymity, creating fertile ground for new darknet markets to surface and a strong incentive for criminals to launch cunning cyberattacks.

There’s one thing we know for sure about digital transformation: Cybercrime is an inherent risk of offering services online. For insurers, the biggest threat is application fraud, also known as new account fraud (NAF), which leads to billions of dollars in losses every year.

Last week marked a watershed Election Day in America, but for those of you expecting a political analysis of what transpired, you will be sorely disappointed; for what I want to talk about is identity. Identity from an American point of view. Identity in the context of a crisis that we are facing in this country, which rears its ugly head in so many different ways.