Anti-fraud and Complaints Handling in UK Payment Service Providers

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has published a summary of its findings of its review of anti-fraud controls of UK payment service providers, particularly focused on Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. Let me know if you need assistance in this area.

E-money and payment institutions should at least consider these findings and recommendations as part of their continuing work on staying ahead of fraudsters, even if they consider their systems to be already robust. There is more detail in the FCA web page, but in summary, they found: 

• an insufficient focus on delivering good consumer outcomes in many of the firms we reviewed 

• management information and actions often focused on commercial risk appetite, rather than customer impact and treatment 

• significant scope in many firms to improve the support provided to victims of fraud including from the first point of contact. In many cases, firms need to do more to enable customers to report fraud easily and promptly 

• poor complaint handling including firms often taking too long to respond to customer complaints 

• customers provided with decision letters that were sometimes unclear, confusing, or included unhelpful and, on occasion, accusatory language 

• limited evidence that firms are appropriately taking account of characteristics of customer vulnerability when making decisions about fraud claims and complaints.

Let me know if you need assistance in this area.