Pay.UK Celebrates Success Of Fraud Detection Pilot

Pay.UK announced that a fraud detection trial with Visa has surpassed expectations, indicating it could save the nation’s economy more than £112 million annually.

APP fraud has swiftly become one of the significant forms of fraud in the United Kingdom, with losses reaching about £500 million in 2023.

Pay.UK- which manages the UK’s retail payment platform – conducted a three-month study with Featurespace, Synectics Solutions, Visa, and a group of financial institutions and PSPs.

Visa’s Fraud Detection Service Could Save The UK Economy Over £330 Million Per Year

The project tested a new service that will enable all UK building societies and banks to look at money movements. It utilizes predictive intelligence to find fraud and stop crime before it happens.

Tech partners collected past Faster Payments transaction records from participating banking entities and PSPs as part of a data-sharing contract. Each partner designed machine learning models to spot suspicious actions and compare them to known fraudulent patterns.

The trial achieved a 40% increase in fraud detection with a 5:1 false positive ratio. This would identify more than £330 million in fraud per year.

The Chief Executive Officer of Featurespace, Martina King, said that minimizing financial crime on a large scale demands a partnership between human collaboration and advanced technology. She added that the triumph of this pilot shows that when the payments sector combines its vast resources, the world becomes a more secure place for transactions for everyone.

Visa noted that its AI tool effectively spotted 54% of APP scams and fraud not identified by the banks’ defense systems.

The Fraud Detection Tool Is Tailored For Use By All PSPs

Pay.UK affirms that the tool has been tailored so that every PSP can utilize it. This makes it a broad market solution that safeguards all individuals and companies in the UK from falling victim to fraud, regardless of their chosen bank.

Lead development officer and anti-fraud chief at Pay.UK, Kate Frankish, noted that 232,429 individuals fell victim to fraud in the UK last year. She said that to minimize the ongoing crimes, everyone needs to work together, and this new service will be a big step in the right direction.

Chief Executive of Visa in the UK & Ireland, Mandy Lamb, also spoke about the upcoming service. She said that the UK has one of the most advanced payment networks worldwide but also experiences some of the highest occurrences of account-to-account fraud. Lamb added that once fraud occurs, the criminals get the money, so preventing fraud must be a collective goal for all the companies in the financial services sector and beyond.