European fraud experts have called on EU regulators to put on hold the implementation of the European Banking Authority (EBA) Guidelines on Fraud Reporting under the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) until the revised European Central Bank’s (ECB) Regulation on Payments Statistics come into force.

In a note issued today, 18 account-servicing payment service providers (AS-PSPs) from 10 European countries have recommended steps to minimise fragmentation risks and ensure both maximal legal certainty and longer-term viability for the implementation programmes that providers and national authorities are putting in place for fraud reporting.

AS-PSPs across the continent are presently implementing national transpositions of the Guidelines on Fraud Reporting under PSD2 issued by the EBA, which will be followed by an updated version of the ECB Regulation on Payments Statistics scheduled to become applicable in 2021.

“Fraud experts throughout Europe are very concerned about the lack of alignment they have come across in their practical analysis of the new fraud reporting requirements in terms of content, format and deadlines,” commented Thomas Egner, secretary general of the Euro Banking Association.

“The different national transpositions of the EBA Guidelines and the fact that these will be closely followed by an ECB Regulation superseding them are challenging for the implementation projects of multinational and smaller PSPs alike,” he continued, explaining that this is why these experts are calling for the introduction of one single set of regulatory requirements.

Egner said that this would ideally be via the ECB Regulation, which should establish fully standardised and comprehensive data collection and transmission requirements, as well as uniform reporting periods and deadlines.

The recommendation note is the result of a series of workshops jointly organised by the PSD2 Practitioners’ Panel and the SCT Inst Migration Action Round Table (SMART2).

The aim of the EBA Fraud Reporting Guidelines was to require payment service providers across the 28 EU Member States, to collect and report data on payment transactions using a consistent methodology, definitions and data breakdowns.

It foresees the submission of a uniform set of data by PSPs to their national competent authorities on a semi-annual basis, starting from 2019.

The recommendation note was endorsed by the following institutions: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, BKS Bank, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, DNB Bank, DZ BANK, Erste Group Bank, GDS Cusa, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nordea Bank, Raiffeisen Bank International, Svenska Handelsbanken, Tatra banka, BNY Mellon and UniCredit Bank.

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