ALFA (French insurance fraud prevention agency)

In 1989, French insurance companies set up a joint association so that fraud would no longer be handled one company at a time: ALFA, the Agence pour la lutte contre la fraude à l'assurance, now attached to France Assureurs, the industry federation. It does not handle claims and does not decline cover. Its job is coordination. It trains its members' claims handlers and investigators, runs the network of anti-fraud correspondents at member companies, publishes every year the amount of fraud the market has detected, and manages relations with the police, the gendarmerie and public prosecutors when a case goes beyond a single company. That last role matters more than it looks. A ring that stages fictitious accidents or recycles vehicles reported stolen targets several insurers at once, and none of them alone sees the same names, the same garages or the same witnesses coming back. ALFA is where those signals get cross-checked, within the limits the CNIL, the French data protection authority, sets for the sector's anti-fraud processing. For an underwriter, its annual figures are the only shared measure of the problem in France, and they are read with one caveat: they count detected fraud, and so they also measure each company's detection effort. An insurer that beefs up its investigation team pushes the statistic up without there being any more fraudsters. The comparison with London usually goes against Paris, because the Insurance Fraud Bureau holds a shared register of proven fraudsters and the City of London Police runs a unit paid for by insurers. In France, sharing named data between competitors remains more tightly restricted, and ALFA works first on method, training and the handover to criminal proceedings.