Pioneering pilot unlocks over £100 million in annual savings typically lost to payment fraud

A Synectics Proof-of-Concept (POC) project for Pay.UK has identified an approach to transaction fraud prevention that could save over £100 million lost to scams each year. 

The ground-breaking pilot saw Synectics work alongside industry partners to trial a solution for helping banks, building societies and all types of Payment Service Providers (PSPs), leverage predictive intelligence to detect fraud before it occurs. 

Under a pioneering data-sharing agreement, historical Faster Payments transactional data from participating banks and other payment providers was analysed. 

An average annual uplift in fraud prevention of £112m was achieved, with Synectics using Precision’s multi-award winning capabilities to combine syndicated transaction data with transaction specific features, point of application information, and syndicated National SIRA intelligence. 

Rob Bevington, Head of Data Synectics, commented: “This was a huge project that involved us processing and analysing over 1.7 billion rows of data, vast amounts of modelling and data engineering to optimise real-world performance to best prevent and detect scams.

“As well as finding that syndicated data paired with user-specific modelling and point-of-application data detected the most fraud, the pilot also proved it was possible to do so at a better than 5:1 false positive rate (FPR), meaning that for every 5 transactions flagged as high risk, at least 1 is a confirmed scam.”

Pay.UK now plans to work with the payments industry to share the results more widely, and collaboratively find ways to implement this approach, for the benefit of everyone in the UK. 

Kate Frankish, Chief Business Development Officer and Anti-Fraud Lead at Pay.UK, commented: "The positive results from this pilot demonstrate the importance of innovation and collaboration in developing effective solutions to stay ahead of fraudsters and protect people in the ever-changing payments landscape. In 2022 in the UK, we saw 232,429 people falling victim to APP fraud, to reduce the scale of the crime that is happening we need a unified approach across the market, and this service is a major step forward.”