Fraud Prevention Overlay

In June 2023 we announced our fraud detection pilot in collaboration with the UK payments industry and three leading fraud prevention solution providers – Visa, Featurespace, and Synectics Solutions. The pilot trialled a new overlay service which will allow all UK banks and building societies to analyse money flows and use predictive intelligence to proactively detect fraud and help prevent crime before it occurs, safely and securely. The intention is to create a service that can be adopted by all PSPs, making it a whole market solution which can protect all people and businesses in the UK from becoming victims of fraud, regardless of who they bank with.

The pilot ran for three months, with each partner receiving historic Faster Payments transactional data from participating banks and payment service providers (PSPs) under a pioneering data-sharing agreement. Each partner independently built machine learning models which identified suspicious activity and compared it to known fraudulent behaviours.

The results of the pilot exceeded expectations, revealing  an average 40% uplift in fraud detection at a 5:1 false positive rate. This would see over £112m worth of fraud detected in a year. The results therefore indicate that the new overlay service has been successful in detecting fraudulent activity before it occurs, and demonstrate its potential to prevent people and businesses from becoming victims of fraud.

Delivering a solution that meets the needs of banks and PSPs, is essential. The next phase of development will involve close collaboration with representatives from across the payments industry to develop and define a proposition for the service.

If you would like to be part of the discussion please contact fraudinnovation@wearepay.uk.