Standard Chartered Bank has appointed Graham Baldock to the newly-created role of head of fraud mitigation, trade and commodities, as the bank moves to reinforce its anti-fraud capabilities.

Baldock previously held the role of chief compliance officer at Abu-Dhabi based Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank, which he joined in 2020. Prior to this, he served as global head of financial crime compliance for global trade and receivables finance at HSBC. His previous experience includes almost three years as head of Citi’s Emea global investigation unit, and six years with the Metropolitan Police as detective constable.

He has also held several industry forum roles, including as the co-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) financial crime risk and policy group.

The new hire comes in the wake of a report from the ICC’s UK arm cautioning that fraudulent traders are currently able to exploit gaps in banks’ knowledge to obtain finance illicitly, for example by applying for financing from multiple banks for a single transaction, or using fake documents or companies to generate working capital without any real underlying activity.

With a view to effectively detecting, deterring and preventing duplicate financing, Standard Chartered announced in September that it had completed pilot testing of a new trade financing validation service provided by fintech company MonetaGo over the Swift network, which was launched into live production last week.