Technology

MNP Survey Reveals Critical Gaps in Fraud Awareness Among Quebec Businesses

Published

1 year ago

February 17, 2025

New Findings Highlight Alarming Disconnect Between Perceived and Actual Fraud Risks, Underscoring the Need for Proactive Measures Among Quebec Businesses and a new mindset on the eve of a potential tariff conflict with the United States

MONTRÉAL, Feb. 17, 2025 /CNW/ – The latest survey by MNP’s Forensics, Investigations and Litigation Support Services highlights troubling trends in fraud awareness and prevention among Quebec businesses. The findings underscore a concerning disconnect between perceived and actual fraud risks, emphasizing the need for more robust measures to combat financial fraud .

The survey, conducted on behalf of national professional services firm MNP, was done by Callosum among 256 business owners or senior executives of businesses in Quebec, representing all types of industries across the province.

Survey results show that while one in three (1 in 3) businesses will experience fraud during their lifetime − three times on average for impacted businesses − 78% of businesses still perceive financial fraud risks as low to moderate. Even if more than 40% of respondents acknowledge heightened fraud risks due to economic pressures like inflation and rising interest rates, fraud remains among the least important concerns for Quebec executives, managers and owners and many still lack adequate prevention strategies.

“It’s concerning to see how fraud risk perception has remained almost unchanged since 2021, despite economic disruption and certain high-profile fraud cases,” says Corey Anne Bloom, Partner and Eastern Canada Leader of Forensics, Investigations, and Litigation Support at MNP. “Fraudsters are particularly active in times of upheaval, such as the present. The changes we are currently experiencing, such as economic changes, work structure changes, complexity and rapid technological advancements, heighten fraudster activity, leaving companies more vulnerable and at risk of not properly responding to financial threats. The rise is alarming: 33% of businesses reported fraud incidents or believe they have been victims. Beyond financial losses, fraud erodes staff morale, compounding challenges for already struggling organizations.”

Businesses admit they are not well prepared to deal with financial fraud. Responses indicate that businesses currently have fewer fraud detection measures and techniques in place than before and the survey suggests they may be deprioritizing fraud prevention, potentially due to economic pressures like inflation and rising costs. Despite tips being the most effective method for detecting fraud, fraud detection measures, such as tip lines and frequent anti-fraud training, are underutilized, with only 16% of businesses implementing whistleblower systems. Moreover, 25% of businesses never provide anti-fraud training to employees, and training efforts often exclude non-management staff.

“Unfortunately, increasing financial pressures are creating a dangerous incentive for fraud. With the potential of U.S. tariffs imposed on Canadian imports by the Trump administration, many Quebec companies could see their profitability affected, increasing the pressure on their financial operations. Quebec households won’t be spared either, suffering repercussions if Canadian tariffs are imposed in response, but also through inflation and rising interest rates, adding further incentives to fraud,” adds Simon Gaudreau, Senior Manager of Forensics, Investigations, and Litigation Support at MNP in Montréal. “While executives focus on high-profile risks like cybersecurity or theft of confidential information, this often creates blind spots for more specific threats such as payroll fraud, fraud in financial statements or less-publicized fraud schemes. Businesses must act now to address these neglected risks and close the gaps in their fraud defences to protect themselves effectively.”

Other major highlights from the MNP survey:

Staff recruitment and labour shortages (30%) are the top concerns for businesses, with two out of three respondents ranking it among their top three priorities. Financial or workplace fraud (4%), on the other hand, ranks second to last.Business owners were more likely to perceive fraud as a high risk but concerns about fraud risk drop when speaking to non-owner executives. Younger respondents also view financial fraud as a higher risk compared to older individuals.Theft of confidential information and intellectual property was again considered to be the highest perceived fraud risk, yet this type of fraud was cited as the fifth most prevalent type of fraud really impacting Quebec businesses. “Embezzlement,” meanwhile, had one of the lowest perceived risks despite being the second prevalent fraud scheme impacting Quebec businesses.Most respondents believe their risk of fraud is equal to competitors, but three times as many think they are at lower risk (5%) rather than higher risk (16%). Similarly, most respondents believe that other lines of business face a comparable or higher risk of financial fraud as their own.Financial need (68%) seems to be the most common perceived motivation for committing financial fraud, followed by a lack of loyalty to the business (46%). Interestingly, owners are less likely than others within businesses to think financial need is the main motivation of employees committing fraud.The average number of financial frauds targeting victimized businesses increased from two (2) occurrences in 2021 to an average of three (3) occurrences in 2024.Billing (31%) and payroll (25%) fraud have become some of the most prevalent forms of financial fraud. Embezzlement (30%) also remains a major concern, continuing to impact a substantial number of businesses.Basic anti-fraud controls usage, such as segregation of duties and pre-employment checks, have declined, increasing the risk of fraud.Solution Ideas: MNP recommends proactive measures, including regular fraud risk assessments, whistleblower hotlines or reporting mechanisms, ongoing employee training and collaboration with external anti-fraud specialists to mitigate vulnerabilities and improve resilience.

The complete results of this survey can be found here: https://www.mnp.ca/en/-/media/files/mnp/pdf/service/forensics/perceptions-of-owners-and-senior-executives-of-quebec-businesses-regarding-the-risk-of-fraud.pdf

To share this news on social media, please use: @MNPquebec (LinkedIn), @MNPquebec (Facebook) and @MNPquebec (Instagram).

About MNP

National in scope and local in focus, MNP is one of Canada’s leading professional services firms — proudly serving individuals, businesses, and organizations since 1958. Through the development of strong relationships, we provide client-focused accounting, consulting, tax, and digital services. Our clients benefit from personalized strategies with a local perspective to fuel success wherever business takes them. For more information, visit www.mnp.ca

SOURCE MNP

Technology

Northern Hemisphere Heat Drives Demand for Cooling and Sun-Protection Products on Yiwugo

Published

37 minutes ago

July 24, 2026

YIWU, China, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Yiwugo.com, the official website of the Yiwu Commodity Market, is the largest commodity wholesale market in the world. The final whistle may have blown on the World Cup, but the intense heat gripping the Northern Hemisphere shows no sign of letting up. Europe has experienced unusually hot weather this year, sparking not only a surge in demand for air conditioners but also a boom in portable handheld fans. Merchants on Yiwugo say that in previous years, European customers would begin placing orders in March or April and take their time completing their annual procurement. This year, however, the purchasing season has stretched well into summer, with a flood of new buyers coming in, most of them looking for small handheld fans. With customers eager to capitalize on the peak summer season, delivery timelines have also become significantly tighter. Whereas orders in previous years could generally be fulfilled within a month, merchants are now frequently being asked to deliver within about a week, leaving manufacturers scrambling to keep pace with demand.

Lingpan Official Flagship Store has specialized in the production and sales of small fans, insulated cups, and related products for 15 years. This summer, demand from European customers for high-speed small fans has risen sharply, accompanied by urgent delivery requirements. Many customers began requesting shipment just one week after placing their orders, hoping the products would arrive in time for the World Cup and the ongoing heatwave across Europe. One long-standing European customer purchased only five models of small fans from Lingpan last year. Anticipating stronger demand ahead of this summer, the customer expanded the order to 10 models. The first shipment sold out soon after arriving at port, prompting several subsequent repeat orders. European buyers have shown particular interest in high-speed cooling fans and placed great requirements on product quality. So far this year, Lingpan’s fan sales have more than doubled compared with the same period last year, with total purchases reaching approximately RMB 1 million.

Beyond Europe, the owner of Lingpan, Ling Pan pointed out that the Indian market has also undergone significant changes over the past two years. Indian customers are showing great interest in panda-shaped fans, drinking cups, and related products. Procurement volumes among many Indian buyers have increased substantially, with average annual purchases now reaching several hundred thousand yuan.

Unlike European countries grappling with sudden heat waves, Asian markets such as Japan and South Korea, where summers are consistently hot and air conditioners and fans are already everyday essentials, have shown much stronger demand for sun-protection products. From April 1, 2026 to date, sales of sun-protection masks on Yiwugo have increased by 31.6% YoY, while sales of sun-protection face shields surged by 72.42% and sun hats rose by 8.1%.

Chen Jia, a Yiwugo merchant, has engaged in the production and sales of sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields for eight years. Chen operates the Xiao Zhen and Xiao Mian Sun-Protection Products Workshop in District 4 of the Yiwu International Trade Market. In recent years, the company has customized cooling nylon fabrics for customers in Japan and South Korea. Sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields made from this material not only offer UPF 50+ protection, but also maintain a more structured shape and are less susceptible to snagging or deformation. Their protective performance remains effective after routine washing, and the products can last for more than five years under normal use.

In 2024, a TV shopping operator from South Korea contacted Xiao Zheng and Xiao Mian through Yiwugo and began placing orders after inspecting the products in person. Over the following two years, the company continued to improve the fitness and design of its sun-protection products. It introduced sun-protection face shields with breathable mesh panels and incorporated soft supports around the nose area to prevent the masks from rubbing against lipstick. These product upgrades have steadily driven up customer ratings on the client’s store. Annual procurement, initially valued at around RMB 300,000, has risen year by year, and the company has since developed into a recognized brand in the local market.

Persistent heat across the Northern Hemisphere has been creating new forms of cross-border consumer demand while enabling Yiwugo merchants to keenly capture shifts in overseas markets. From the strong sales of small portable fans in Europe to the rising demand for functional sun-protection products in Japan and South Korea, the diversity of orders reflects both consumers’ need for relief from extreme heat and the ability of Yiwu manufacturers to strengthen their presence in global markets through product innovation and rapid fulfillment. Faced with a rapidly changing international market, many merchants are continuing to refine product designs, upgrade fabric techniques, and enhance supply efficiency. By leveraging Yiwugo to broaden their export channels, they are keeping pace with overseas consumption trends and capitalizing on the expanding market for cooling and sun-protection products, turning the summer heat into new momentum for cross-border trade.

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SOURCE Yiwugo.com

Technology

Snorkel AI Highlights First Wave of Open Benchmarks Grants Projects

Published

37 minutes ago

July 24, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Snorkel AI today highlighted the first group of projects supported through Open Benchmarks Grants, a $3 million commitment to support open-source datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation research.

Launched in February 2026, Open Benchmarks Grants has received hundreds of applications from researchers, labs, and engineers working to address a growing challenge: AI systems are advancing faster than the field’s ability to rigorously measure their performance on realistic, consequential work.

“From complex environments and huge autonomy horizons to rich, sophisticated outputs, these projects tackle some of the field’s hardest evaluation challenges,” said Fred Sala, a member of the Open Benchmarks Grants steering committee and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I’m excited to see the broader research community use, validate, and build on them.”

Open Benchmarks Grants provides selected teams with funding, expert data development support, research and engineering collaboration, and platform resources. Supported projects include:

Frontier-Bench (formerly Terminal-Bench 3.0), developed with Laude Institute and the Harbor community, is a harder, more domain-diverse successor to Terminal-Bench 2.1 — built in the open, task by task, under continuous adversarial review.Agents’ Last Exam, developed with UC Berkeley RDI and the RDI Foundation, evaluates agents on long-horizon, economically valuable professional workflows. It spans 55 sub-industries and includes more than 1,500 tasks toward a 5,000-task target, sourced and validated by more than 300 industry experts.OSWorld 2.0, developed with XLANG Lab, evaluates computer-use agents on 108 long-horizon workflows across 31 self-hosted web environments and professional desktop applications.Continual Learning Bench, developed with UC Berkeley SkyLab and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures whether agents genuinely improve across sequential, stateful tasks.SlopCode Bench, developed with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures how code quality degrades as coding agents repeatedly modify and extend their own solutions.Terminal-Bench 2.1, developed with Stanford University, Laude Institute and the Harbor community, evaluates agents on challenging work in terminal environments. The release corrected 28 tasks and introduced continuous validation.

With support from Open Benchmarks Grants, Terminal-Bench Science is also now in development, extending the Terminal-Bench framework to computational research workflows across the life, physical, earth, and mathematical sciences.

Beyond the grants program, Snorkel led the development of Senior SWE-Bench with the research teams at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The benchmark evaluates coding agents on senior-level engineering work, including implementing features from realistic instructions, investigating bugs that require runtime analysis, and producing code that follows existing codebase conventions.

Open Benchmarks Grants was established with support from Hugging Face, Prime Intellect, Together AI, Factory, Harbor, and PyTorch. Applications remain open and are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Learn more and apply for a grant at benchmarks.snorkel.ai.

About Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes.

media@snorkel.ai

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SOURCE Snorkel AI

Technology

Payzli Vaults to No. 3 on Tampa Bay’s Fast 50, Up From No. 22 in One Year

Published

37 minutes ago

July 24, 2026

Payments technology company, Payzli earns a second consecutive Fast 50 ranking, crediting the climb to accelerating partner and merchant growth on its proprietary technology stack.

TAMPA, Fla., July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Payzli, the partner-first payments technology company, has been named the No. 3 fastest-growing company in the region on the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s 2026 Fast 50 – a 19-spot climb from its No. 22 debut last year, and the company’s second consecutive year on the list.

The ranking was announced July 23 at the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Fast 50 event in Tampa, where Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Naim Hamdar accepted the award alongside members of the Payzli team.

Payzli attributed its growth to a compounding effect: a national network of ISOs, agents and ISVs bringing merchants onto a technology platform Payzli built and operated in-house.

That platform rests on three proprietary pillars:

Payzli Connect: the company’s payment CRM and merchant-and-partner dashboard, giving agents and ISOs daily residuals visibility and giving merchants a single place to run their account.Payzli POS: AI-powered point-of-sale and business software purpose-built for service businesses, including salons, med spas, wellness studios, and independent operators.Payzli Transact: an online payment gateway built on Visa Platform Connect through Payzli’s partnership with Visa Acceptance Solutions.

The Visa Acceptance Solutions partnership is central to how Payzli frames its credibility: rather than assembling a growth story on top of borrowed infrastructure, the company processes on rails backed by one of the most established networks in the industry alongside Fiserv and TSYS – a point that matters to the partners and merchants deciding where to place their volume.

“A second year on this list, and a jump to No. 3, isn’t about one good quarter. It’s about a network deciding to build with us and stay,” said Naim Hamdar, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Payzli. “Every rank on this list represents partners we’ve earned and merchants who trust us to run their payments. We built the technology in-house so we could keep the promises the industry usually breaks: nothing hidden, a real person in reach, and daily residual visibility our agents can actually count on. That’s what this ranking measures and it’s why we’re doing it all, for the joy of business.”

“They say nothing in Tampa moves fast except the afternoon thunderstorms, so making the Fast 50 two years running feels pretty good,” said Kapil Pershad, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Payzli. “In all seriousness, this is a credit to our team and the businesses that trust us to power their growth.”

The Fast 50, produced by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, recognizes the fastest-growing private companies in the Tampa Bay region. Payzli’s return to the list and its move into the top three reflects a merchant-first product suite and a rapidly expanding national partner network across the payments and embedded-finance landscape.

About Payzli

Payzli is an end-to-end payments technology partner that makes accepting payments simpler and affordable for businesses of all sizes and risk levels. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Tampa, Florida, Payzli brings together in-person processing, an advanced online gateway, AI-powered point of sale, and mobile and contactless payments – backed by its own technology, honest pricing, and dedicated human support. Built partner-first, Payzli equips ISOs, agents, developers, and independent software vendors to grow, with direct integrations to major processing platforms, in-house underwriting, a flexible credit policy, a Visa Acceptance Solutions foundation partnership, and sponsor-bank backing from Esquire Bank, a NASDAQ-listed strategic investor in Payzli. For more information, email partners@payzli.com or visit payzli.com.

Payzli is a registered trademark of United Payment Systems LLC. United Payment Systems LLC is a registered ISO of Esquire Bank (Jericho, NY), Commercial Bank of California (Irvine, CA), and KeyBank, National Association (Cleveland, OH).

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SOURCE Payzli