Active Chartered Financial Planners

09/09/21

A meeting between three North East business leaders and the newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Cleveland has successfully highlighted the growing problem of fraud in the business community.

Executives from Active Chartered Financial Planners, a Stockton-based finance specialist, Cyberwhite, a cyber security specialist with offices in Middlesbrough and Sunderland, and Lemon Business Solutions, an outsourcing partner in Stockton, invited Steve Turner to discuss how the police and business communities can work together to tackle the serious problem of increasing levels of financial, data and identity fraud in the region.

Businesses have first-hand knowledge of how increasingly creative scams and fraudulent activities are impacting businesses and individuals, who may be targeted through text messages, emails, phone calls, social media, cyber-attacks or phoney investment offers.

Martin Anderson, chief executive of Lemon Business Solutions, was one of four business leaders to write to Steve Turner, Cleveland’s newly elected Police and Crime Commissioner, bringing the fact that more than £500 million was lost to bank transfer fraud in the UK in 2020, to his attention.

He called on the Police and Crime Commissioner to put tackling fraud at the heart of his agenda, alongside Karl Pemberton, managing director of Active Chartered Financial Planners and Matt Hewison, co-founder and chief operating officer of Cyberwhite.

At a meeting between the business leaders and Mr Turner, scams like the ‘get rich quick’ investments into cryptocurrencies advertised on social media sites, and fraudsters’ increasingly creative techniques to scam people out of money and personal data, were discussed.

As a cyber security expert, Cyberwhite is looking forward to working with Mr. Turner as part of a long-term strategy to reduce the number of scams to which individuals in the North East receive and respond.

Matt Hewison said: “I think if we’re able to work together, we’re much stronger. If we’re able to discuss together the challenges we’re all facing, whether they’re technical, or around our people, or around compliance and processes, I think we’ll be in a much better place.”

Martin Anderson, chief executive officer at Lemon Business Solutions, said: “I hope Steve heard our concerns and he’ll take it away and feed it back to his teams and really consider cybercrime and Tees Valley businesses when he’s putting together his action plan.”

Karl Pemberton, managing director of Active Chartered Financial Planners and chair of the Institute of Directors (IoD) Tees Valley, said: “I hope that Steve will take away how important this is. Ultimately it is a crime and I think it’s quite often low on the agenda because there are more serious crimes out there that I think are reported far more. However, there are lots of victims out there and hopefully we can reduce those numbers within our area.”

Steve Turner, Police and Crime Commissioner for Cleveland, said: “Talking about cybercrime and the effect it has on individuals and businesses has been brilliant. There’s a lot that’s come out of today and lots we can do working together going forward.

“The next step for me is to look at a business forum to raise awareness of digital and cyber crime amongst businesses, which is something that my office is going to facilitate. I’m also going to look at ways of involving young people, who are the next generation, and we need to make them aware now of the potential issues they will face with cybercrime in the future.”

ENDS

ISSUED ON BEHALF OF CYBERWHITE, LEMON BUSINESS SOLUTIONS AND ACTIVE CHARTERED FINANCIAL PLANNERS

Contact Josh Mason on 01325 363436

Editors’ Notes:

CyberWhite, is an established provider of cyber security and risk mitigation solutions for business, with offices in Sunderland and Middlesbrough.

The team passionately believes in the vision that delivering technology solutions and information assurance services should be innovative and customer focused.

CyberWhite is proud to assist many well-known names with risk mitigation strategies, security technologies and assurance and training.

It works with customers to understand their companies and the challenges they face, delivering bespoke solutions to specifically addressthe areas identified.

Active Chartered Financial Planners is a team of specialist Independent Financial Advisers that provides a full suite of holistic financial planning services to private individuals, corporate businesses and professional practices. Being independent means that Active can offer its clients the best financial products, with no bias towards certain providers.

The highly coveted “Chartered” status, which it has held since in 2013, means Active works to standards matched by only a tiny proportion of financial planning firms. Chartered status is central to the business and demonstrates Active’s commitment to remain at the forefront of the industry.

With a history dating back to 1986, today Active is based at modern Head Offices in Thornaby (Stockton on Tees) and covers the entire North East and Yorkshire regions.

The team at Active is highly qualified; including 6 Chartered Financial Planners holding Fellowship status; the highest level of qualification awarded in the industry.

Active’s Financial Planning Services include:

• Investment Planning
• Retirement Planning
• Protection Planning
• Later Life Planning
• Planning for Your Business
• Mortgage Planning

http://www.activefinancialplanners.co.uk

twitter.com/ActiveFinancial

Lemon Business Solutions was established in 2003 out of a passion to provide world class customer service. It takes great pride in delivering excellent service and each and every customer gets the VIP treatment. It’s not your average call centre; the team is dynamic, and eager to provide an outstanding service with integrity at its core. It delivers bespoke customer service solutions, whatever a company’s requirements.

Lemon is innovative and uses technology to assist but doesn’t hide behind it. There’s no robotic call scripting, just real people having real conversations. They don’t manage clients at arm’s length and make them deal only with an account manager. With Lemon, the client gets direct access to the senior management team.

Lemon understands the importance of good systems and process and that’s why it has committed to achieving and retaining international standards in the form of ISO9001 and ISO27001 certifications, which support its purpose and assure clients of absolute professionalism at all times.