Pay.UK and UK Finance publish first iteration of technical collateral for Enhanced Fraud Data Standard
Today we are publishing the first iteration of technical collateral for the Enhanced Fraud Data standard, for review, consideration and wider input by the retail payments industry.
This is the latest stage in helping us to realise our ambition of building an Application Programming Interface (API) solution through which standardised customer data will be sent. This, in turn, will help economic crime specialists identify suspicious payments, or Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams, prior to a credit transfer occurring.
APP fraud continues to significantly impact many people on a daily basis. Total reported APP losses in 2021 were £355.3m and £249m in the first half of 2022 alone. APP scams are continually adapting and their victims are sometimes losing life-changing amounts of money. Data sharing is one of the key approaches for addressing APP fraud and to tackle this issue directly, we are working with the wider retail payments ecosystem, alongside regulators, to create meaningful and sustainable solutions.
The standardisation of data is a solution that can address some of the existing challenges around data exchange. If all parties, such as banks and financial institutions, agree how the information being sent should be structured and defined, it ensures that the sender and receiver of the credit transfer will have the data in exactly the same format, consequently reducing the risk of fraud.
In 2021, we established the Enhanced Fraud Data Standards Group (EFDSG) with UK Finance. The aim of this group is to provide technical standards expertise and support in the development of a data standard to enable the sharing of enhanced data between financial institutions.
In February 2022, we completed Phase 1 of our Enhanced Fraud Data standard work. With input and collaboration from many industry specialists, we were able to determine several key pieces of data that could be used by economic crime specialists to identify suspect payments, sooner. This allowed us to develop a logical data model, which provides a consistent approach for managing and organising this key data across organisations.
Following the reconvening of the EFDSG in Q4 last year, we have now completed Phase 2 by defining the structure and usage of a selection of specific data fields. These data fields have been identified as key by those economic crime specialists working with UK Finance.
Following today’s publication and subsequent review of the first iteration of technical collateral for the standard, we will continue to work on standardising additional data over the course of this year. This will include seeking to understand how we can create additional opportunities for using the enhanced data we have consulted on, more broadly through our standards work for the New Payments Architecture (NPA).
We will articulate our approach to wider stakeholders in due course, but in the meantime, should you wish to access the Enhanced Fraud Data standard, please contact us at standards@wearepay.uk and we will assess your application for access. Please continue to check the Pay.UK website for further updates.