Analytical hierarchy processes and Pareto analysis for mitigating cybercrime in the financial sector

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to use a decision support model based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Pareto analysis (PA) for ranking the impact of different kinds of cybercrime in organisations in the financial sector to support decisions on cybercrime mitigation. Design/methodology/approach: From a structured questionnaire to the staff of 17 licensed banks in South Africa in charge of management, administration and operations, the perceived effect of cybercrime on the organisation’s goals, namely, organisation’s profitability, goodwill, customers’ satisfaction and risk management was derived. The pairwise comparison of the organisation’s goals and identified forms of cybercrime was done using the AHP. Findings: The results obtained indicate that there was a consensus (100% of the answers) that the effect of cybercrime has negatively impacted the organisation’s objectives profitability and goodwill. Also, still 95.23% of the respondents agreed that the effect of cybercrime has negatively impacted the level of customers’ satisfaction, while only 7.15% saw an impact on the organisation’s risk management processes. Using these results in the AHP, analysis delivers a hierarchical order about the relevance of prevalent forms of cybercrime for the organisation´s cybercrime mitigation. The PA further shows the magnitude of the forms of cybercrime relative to each other. Practical implications: Hence, this study provides a decision support framework for organisational management in the quest to explore the impact of cyber fraud. It can serve as a practical guided approach for the application of AHP analysis for the existing and emerging forms of cybercrime. Originality/value: The novelty of this study lies in the fact that the combination of the AHP and PA to support solving a multi-criteria decision problem relating to the prevalence of cybercrime has not been sufficiently highlighted by the existing literature.