Recruitment
“Throughout the last year, the Compliance Team at Virgin Trains has had a huge number of changes introduced to aid and drive forward business & technology change, along with the recent creation of a Virgin Trains Fraud Team.
The team consists of 9 fantastic individuals who are dedicated to Virgin and ensuring that we are compliant in every area from Retail, On-board, Fraud, and all things Accountancy based.
The team is expertly led by Dave Whittall who offers brilliant leadership from the top down and this shows in how the team work together in each area to help, develop & support new initiatives which are introduced to remain and enhance our Compliance at Virgin Trains.
A recent project undertaken by the team working closely with our Payroll team allowed them to implement and remove our dated paper-based system for submitting expenses and move forward to a more robust, digital paperless system which will benefit the whole business moving forward. The team took time out from their own jobs, to test, create training packages and roadshows around the country to all users and promote the benefits that these changes would bring.
Another project saw them work with the Business Intelligence team
making some remarkable changes to help improve our reporting tools and we have now embraced a system called Power BI and this will benefit the whole team moving forward and the Retail & On-board Teams as all things move in a more digital way. They are an inquisitive team and this only benefits and supports these teams when ideas are sought and shared to streamline the Compliance processes.
The Route Compliance team have had numerous changes due to the introduction of the new digital systems and moving away from paper-based checks which were time-consuming and the new system now allows the team to be more pro-active in identifying issues, spending time with the relevant teams, managers and individuals to help identify training issues, streamline processes and build relationships around the network.
Our Fraud team were brought in to focus largely on delay repay fraud & they saw immediate successes and the team have continued to go from strength to strength including, helping to gather requirements, develop, test and implement a new Delay Repay Fraud system, using the system to improve how we identify and mitigate fraud & finally collaborating across the industry to help fight against fraudulent activity. Virgin Trains have trusted in the approach they have adopted for fraud and the future strategy they have for this small but mighty team.
The whole team have built amazing, supportive, and lasting relationships & friendships not only within the team but with their colleagues on the frontline.
For building an amazing team and delivering huge changes throughout the business, I would therefore like to nominate Dave Whittall and his team of Lisa Brown, Neil Egerton, Laura Duncan, Jo Rogers, Hayley Whitehouse, Sarah Webb, Amy Duff & Mick O'Brien. An amazing team who have been superb and always work so hard together to allow us remain Compliant around our business whilst having fun along the way!“
“I would like to nominate the compliance team at Virgin Trains because every day this team approaches their job both professionally and efficiently and due to the nature of their task this sometimes goes unnoticed.
The team has been responsible for bringing in new and innovative ways of going about their work such as the implementation of a new and better way of managing expenses and robust and efficient systems for monitoring and detecting fraudulent delay repay claims.
Alongside the work they do I would also like to mention that the team are constantly willing to help or support anyone at any time and they have been very helpful to both me personally and many other people around the business. They are also genuinely friendly and fun people to work with.“
“This team has evolved over several years into an industry leader in fraud and loss mitigation. The team recognised a few years back an emerging risk from delay repay compensation fraud and lead industry initiatives in combating this. Through measuring and highlighting the risk a new fraud prevention application was built, a rules based system which looks for patterns, trends and common denominators that point to suspicious activity. On the back of this a fraud department was added to the Compliance Team and since implementation have saved half significant six figure sums from would be fraudulent claims as well as identifying serious organised crime resulting in criminal proceedings. The result of all this is that our legitimate customers get their compensation quickly and efficiently and we just deal with the minority who wish to commit fraud and increasing the cost of looking after our railways.
Ticket refunds are another risk to the business and the industry and as such the team have begun to pave the way for more data driven analysis to detect regular abusers of the refund system, this alone saved the a sizeable 6 figure sum in the last 12 months.
As an industry leader, the team have pushed this fraud threat into the focus of the Rail Delivery Group agenda and joined CIFAS fraud sharing organisation, the first train company to do so, and we encourage other TOC's to follow suit.
In collaboration with our fantastic business intelligence team, the team have developed some fantastic insight into digital ticket scanning which gives us the ability to detect fraud and misuse in the digital ticket world. When some TOC's are tentative around the fraud risk that digital tickets might bring, this team are excelling and are confident of mitigating the risk in the digital future.
The team have developed some great systems to examine internal fraud and through pattern and trend analysis and have been able to move away from very manual and time consuming processes. The team are moving steadily from being reactive to the internal fraud threat to extremely proactive with some fantastic results.
The team support cross functionally to ensure the greatest customer experience to our legitimate customers, engage our wonderful colleagues but ensure profit is maximised by not tolerating fraud and abuse.
Furthermore the team continues to drive efficiencies, aside from the technology aspects being pursued a lot has to be said for the whole teams work ethic, willingness to embrace and lead change and continually challenging the status quo. A true team effort in every respect“
“Thank you for Saturday night at the awards. My wife & I had a great time.”
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