Bottomline and Pay.UK Team on Fraud Prevention

Payments FinTech Bottomline has teamed with Pay.UK to help companies prevent fraud.

The collaboration, announced Monday (July 17), sees Pay.UK — the recognized standards body for the U.K.’s national retail payment schemes — launching its Payer Name Verification service via Bottomline Payment Services.

According to a news release, this will give businesses more assurance that payments are being collected from the named account holder when processing direct debits.

“The new service confirms the bank account details provided belong to the named business or individual, giving companies greater confidence that the direct debit is being set up by the actual account holder, helping to lower the risk of an indemnity claim,” the release said.

The release said Payer Name Verification is an expansion of Pay.UK’s Confirmation of Payee name-checking service for U.K.-based payments, which debuted in 2020 and has been used by more than 80 U.K. banks, building societies and other payment service providers.

PYMNTS spoke in May with Kate Frankish, anti-fraud lead at Pay.UK, about the way investments in better fraud detection/prevention systems in Great Britain have helped the country bring down its financial crime rates.

But it remains “a real balancing act,” she added, “because what we don’t want to do as an industry is to slow down and stop valid payments, which only disrupts the payments chain.”

This is where employing technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can play a massive role, she said, especially considering that close to 80% of cases of authorized push payment (APP) fraud — in which fraudsters impersonate a payee and trick an individual or business into sending them an instant payment — begin online.

“Some of the leaps and bounds in AI and machine learning have helped to spot patterns of fraud and money moving around not just in the U.K. but globally,” Frankish noted. However, AI is “not one silver bullet” which is going to fix everything, she said, pointing to the need for each bank to tailor its fraud prevention strategy — whether fully manual, tech-based or a mix of both — based on its expertise.

Last month, Pay.UK announced it was piloting a new payments industry collaboration to help fight fraud. The plan is to create an overlay service that will be offered to payment service providers and will study money flows and use predictive intelligence to spot fraud and help prevent crime before it happens.

“To outpace the scammers, we will need to work together, with better collaboration and knowledge sharing,” Frankish said at the time. “That’s why Pay.UK is bringing the payments industry together to share data and resources.”