28 June 2023 – Pay.UK today announces a major new collaboration within the UK payments industry that will help fight fraud by bringing together the combined power of data from multiple high street banks and payment service providers for the first time.
Confirmed today in a pilot form, the initiative aims to create a new overlay service for UK banks and building societies that will safely and securely analyse money flows and use predictive intelligence to proactively detect fraud and help prevent crime before it occurs.
Pay.UK has signed contracts with industry partners including Visa, Synectics Solutions and Featurespace to test the potential benefits of the service before making a decision on next steps for development.
Each partner participating in the pilot will receive historic Faster Payments transactional data from participating banks and PSPs under a pioneering data-sharing agreement. The selected suppliers will then build artificial intelligence and machine learning models which will identify suspicious activity and compare it to known fraudulent behaviours.
It is planned that the overlay will ultimately be offered to payment service providers as a new product to help the fight against fraud, building on the work of Confirmation of Payee, another anti-fraud overlay tool that Pay.UK rolled out successfully in 2020.
Data security is critical to the project and Pay.UK has spent almost a year working closely with banks, PSPs, suppliers and specialist legal counsel to ensure that all data is processed securely, legitimately and within a strict scope of use.
In time the service will also be built into the New Payments Architecture, a revolutionary, once-in-a-generation upgrade to the UK payments system that Pay.UK is developing and which will bring more choice, speed and security for everyone who sends and receives money in the UK.
Kate Frankish, Chief Business Development Officer and Anti-Fraud Lead at Pay.UK, said:
“Fraud is one of the biggest challenges we face today, with more people than ever feeling its devastating financial and emotional impact. Fraud losses exceeded £1billion last year, which is equivalent to around £2,300 being stolen every minute.
“To outpace the scammers, we will need to work together, with better collaboration and knowledge sharing. That’s why Pay.UK is bringing the payments industry together to share data and resources. This announcement is a UK first and a major step in the right direction, made possible by Pay.UK’s convening power at the heart of the payments system.”
