Speaking at the recent FS Club seminar on “Authorised Push Payment Fraud Inoculation – The Curious Resistance To Confirmation Of Payee With The Curious Example Of The UK”, John Bertrand (who has 30 years experience in banking and technology at Citibank, FIS Global and SAP) went into the catastrophic rise on instant payments fraud in the UK and looked at what might be done to make a dent in it.
I was struck by John’s comment that the “payee bank account should be held responsible for frauds as that’s where the fraudsters are”. This has always puzzled me about what is called the continent reimbursement model in the UK. Why is the payee bank responsible for compensating the defrauded customer, when their payee bank has done nothing wrong? I can understand that it was easy to target the payee bank, and since it costs £25,000 to investigate an APP fraud properly they will generally pay up rather than actually do anything about it, but there’s something just plain wrong about it.
