Sarah Rutherford

Fraud management and AML compliance are both about tackling financial crime, but often they are managed by different teams, each with their own processes and technology. For many years the idea of convergence in managing financial crime at banks has been under discussion — but is this a meaningful trend or simply wishful thinking? When it comes to the technology to…

Last week UK Finance published their annual fraud report ‘Fraud the Facts 2019’. This year’s report noted that authorised push payment fraud was up by 44% - so what does this leap in the statistic actually show? And how does it fit into the wider context of industry concerns and actions around this type of scam? [caption id="attachment_38049" align="alignnone" width=…

When opening new online accounts, fraud professionals must protect their organization from fraud and keep legitimate customers happy. Application fraud controls must be strong enough to prevent significant losses, but at the same time the application processes shouldn’t be off-putting to customers. It can be difficult to determine the impact that application fraud co…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen several articles and seen and heard many comments that are positively crowing about the demise of SMS as a factor for PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication. While the issues suffered by Metro Bank clearly show there are legitimate concerns, it would be wrong to announce the passing of SMS as an authentication tool for PSD2. Here are 3…

From September this year, PSD2 requires Payment Service Providers (PSPs) to secure more transactions using Strong Customer Authentication. PSD2 mandates a framework for when customers must be authenticated using two different factors from: [caption id="attachment_36879" align="alignnone" width="521"] Source: FICO Blog[/caption] Asking customers to provide these elem…

Payment Service Providers are pushing to implement their PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) solutions ready for the September deadline. But of course it’s not just them that will be affected – it’s also their customers. Customer experience rather than mere compliance could be the true battleground for PSD2, those PSPs that get it right will have happier custome…

Our recent fraud and security survey of 2,000 US adults allowed us to look at the data by different demographic factors. In an earlier post I wrote about how fraud and security issues differ by age group. In this post I’m looking at the impact gender has on how people view fraud and security online and the tolerance they have for how their banking providers manage it.…

Authorised push payment fraud occurs when a person or organization is tricked into making a payment to a fraudster, often one that is posing as a legitimate supplier. I discussed this in more detail in the post ‘What is Authorised Push Payment Fraud?’ .  Given the impact this type of fraud has on both victims and banks Pay.UK (previously known as the New Payment Syste…

We are all used to articles that make sweeping generalizations about age – millennials and avocados springs to mind! But it can be difficult to really understand how, or if you should be customizing online experience to different age group, and how you do that when you must also manage fraud and security. Our survey of 2,000 US consumers uncovers how the age of custo…

In August, the UK’s Financial Ombudsman joined the debate on authorised push payment fraud. They argue that banks are not taking enough responsibility for this kind of fraud and say banks should not take the default position that their customer has been negligent. This follows the announcement by the Payment Services Regulator that they intend to require banks to comp…

There has been another addition to the financial crime lexicon: FRAML stands for Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering. This simple term encompasses a very important trend, particularly for financial services organizations – the bringing together of the separate worlds of the fraud and the financial crime compliance teams. As my colleague Matt Cox wrote in this article ther…

76% of Organizations Have Cyber Risk Insurance – But How Does That Change Across the Globe? Data breaches and cyber-attacks continue to dominate headlines, so we can be sure that try as they might, many organizations can’t protect themselves sufficiently. Should the worst happen, are companies able to use cyber risk insurance to help them recover? Our survey of 500 c…