With the end of 2020 in sight, we crunched the numbers to bring you a round-up of FStech’s most popular stories of the year.

Unsurprisingly, top of the list was a story that hit the headlines in spring, when Which? called for fraud protections to be made mandatory after £1 billion was estimated to have been lost to bank transfer scams over just three years.

At the time the consumer company also raised concerns that some banks were not committed to introducing the protections on time, or even at all.

Which? had analysed bank transfer fraud statistics since the start of 2017, a few months after it first highlighted the threat from these scams with a super-complaint. In March, the projected total lost since then stood at £1.1 billion.

A few months later in August, NatWest and RBS saw their websites up and running after suffering a series of outages that left customers locked out of online banking.
The outages come after credit card customers were unable to access accounts during a glitch that was attributed to a third-party outage at US credit platform Tsys.

Alongside NatWest and RBS, Nationwide Building Society and Tesco Bank also felt the impact of the outages.

Earlier on in the year it was announced that HooYu, a customer onboarding Know Your Customer (KYC) firm, is partnering with Baanx, a mobile cryptocurrency and fiat specialist, to build a digital compliance journey.

The London-based company chose HooYu’s KYC platform to provide identity verification for the onboarding of new customers and streamline the application process, while improving customer experience.

Around the same time, it was reported that SWIFT was set to delay its ISO 20022 migration date for cross-border payments from November next year, to the end of 2022.

The move reflected challenges banks were facing this year in preparing existing infrastructure for the transition.

The common global data ‘language’ is expected to see widespread payments industry adoption, so following feedback from the SWIFT community, the deadline was extended by a year. The ultimate deadline of November 2025 for decommissioning the legacy SWIFT MT standard remained in place.

The fifth most popular article of 2020 revealed that Finastra was back online after it experienced a ransomware attack.

Customers were warned of a "potential security breach" causing disruption to certain services, particularly in North America.

After taking its servers offline, the FinTech closed offices in Canada and London in order to being in a forensic cyber security firm to investigate the scope of the incident.

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