Sarah Rutherford

The Contingent Reimbursement Model is a UK payments industry initiative designed to compensate victims of authorised push payment fraud (APP fraud). Over the past few years, there has been a steady stream of reports of APP fraud — this is where fraudsters use social engineering techniques to trick people or representatives of businesses to send money to them. UK Finan…

Recently banks have hit the headlines both for failing to detect money laundering and for freezing the accounts of legitimate customers when money laundering is suspected. Given that sometimes a financial institution can have both problems, it’s not simply a matter of lifting or lowering their thresholds for suspicion. Banks are treading a fine line – if they are o…

In our brave new world, the use of artificial intelligence can be a contentious issue. For many, the question of AI as friend or foe is not yet resolved. Those who work in fraud management provide a shining example of how AI can be a force for good, and have been doing so for over quarter of a century. Despite being early adopters of AI, now is not the time for fra…

In recent years there has been much talk of the fraud and financial crime departments at banks working together more closely. To better understand the path to convergence of these two vital functions, it is necessary to understand what drives them. FICO commissioned research and analyst company Ovum to carry out an independent research survey to uncover the main co…

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…