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Sepa fraud risk warning for businesses
Laissez-faire attitude adds to confusion over payments...

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Thursday 03 April 2008

As Europe starts to adopt pan-continental payments systems, UK payments takers are ill-equipped to deal with the exposure to fraud this change might bring.

The Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa) directive came into operation at the beginning of the year and Faster Payments protocols are due to go live in May.

But UK organisations in the utilities, telecoms and insurance sectors are not anticipating any change in processes or systems to introduce fraud countermeasures following the introduction of Sepa.

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Sepa allows organisations to offer services easily across the Euro area - but this also means fraudsters can bury their trails across a number of countries.

A survey of 43 companies in the utilities, telecoms and insurance sectors, from newly rebranded Experian Payments (formerly Eiger Systems), found 98 per cent are not planning to change their security policies, even though three-quarters have some business overseas. These sectors were chosen as a sample because they rely heavily on the automated direct debit payments Sepa seeks to streamline.

A significant majority (86 per cent) said they had yet to even assess the payment fraud risk of Sepa, while 15 per cent of the insurance companies questioned believed there was a negligible risk.

Gartner research VP of banking and investment services Alistair Newton said: "There is often a difficulty in assessing the value of data on payment fraud, because of the disparity in how it is measured from organisation to organisation. The important angle here is that there is clearly a lack of visibility around payment fraud at a corporate level."