TSB has struck a partnered with Vocalink to launch an anti-payment fraud platform.

The move pitches the challenger as one of the first UK banks to implement a Confirmation of Payee process, which can help avoid payments being misdirected with an account name checking service.

The partnership with Vocalink, a Mastercard company, will provide an enhanced layer of security for payments, helping the bank’s digital customers ensure their money reaches the right account and guards against payment fraud attempts.

Currently, when making payments, the account name is not checked when sending an electronic payment and fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated in using this to trick people into sending money to the wrong account as part of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud.

According to data from UK Finance there were 84,624 cases of APP fraud in the UK in 2018 with £354.3m lost as a result.

Applying Vocalink’s data science capabilities, which are trained on over 20 billion transactions amounting to trillions of pounds in value, the solution will match the name of the account holder to the sort code and account number with a higher degree of accuracy than a simple direct name match.

The technology builds on the roll out of Vocalink’s anti-money laundering solution which enables suspicious payments to be tracked as they move between bank and building society accounts.

Suresh Viswanathan, TSB’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “We’re leveraging our modern platform to deliver the best solutions for our customers. With over 230,000 payments made every day, we are providing the latest cutting-edge technology to help prevent TSB customers from sending money to the wrong account and to safeguard them from fraudsters.”

In April, TSB announced a Fraud Refund Guarantee, to ensure the Bank’s 5.2 million customers are protected if they fall victim of fraud – whether unauthorised transactions on their accounts or customers tricked into authorising payments to fraudsters.

Figures from UK Finance revealed that the banking industry stopped £820 million of unauthorised fraud in the first half of 2019 -equivalent to £4.5 million a day.

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