Bottomline, a provider of financial technology that makes business payments simple, smart and secure, has announced that LHV and The Access Bank UK Ltd have signed up to the business’ cloud-based Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service to help combat APP fraud.
Introduced in July 2020, Confirmation of Payee is a fraud prevention system led by Pay.UK and operated with Open Banking, which confirms the recipient’s name matches the details held by the bank. This process is designed to address both payment errors and rising incidents of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, where a consumer or business gets tricked into approving a payment to a fraudster’s account.
Marten Vill, Open Banking and API Product Manager at LHV, said: “Using the latest SaaS technology to protect our customers’ money is an important differentiator for us. We wanted to make sure we joined Phase 1 of CoP to immediately eliminate the rising losses in APP fraud in the industry, which rose to £479 million in 2020. CoP will also be a valuable building block in our constantly improving set of API services that we offer to our fintech customers.”
As early adopters of CoP, LHV and The Access Bank UK Ltd will now have access to Bottomline’s full CoP service for inbound and outbound payments. The new measure provides the banks’ customers with an extra layer of defence against APP fraud and greater assurance that their payments are going to the right recipient. The service uses Bottomline’s API to validate the beneficiary’s name and account details against the information held on file whether sending or receiving payments, protecting the banks’ reputation as the trusted custodian of customer funds.
“The latest figures reported by UK Finance show that APP fraud remains stubbornly high, with a 22% increase in cases,” said Ed Adshead-Grant, General Manager, Payments at Bottomline. “Beyond the risk of financial losses, CoP will help banks improve their customer journey and support ongoing trust in their brand. With 95% of UK banks still introducing CoP, we believe more needs doing to encourage universal adoption to lock out the organised criminal activity and ensure deposits flow efficiently and correctly.”
Bob Attwood, Head of IT and Operations at The Access Bank UK Ltd, said: “As a relationship bank, we want to make sure our customers are fully protected against the growing instances of APP fraud, whilst making it as simple as possible for our customers to send funds to us. Bottomline provides this out of the box with their CoP solution.”
