When it comes to innovation, the United Kingdom can find itself on a literal island. And the kingdom’s latest regulatory push, one that is targeting authorized push payment (APP) fraud, has left observers wondering whether that island may be sinking.
This, as the U.K.’s first Global Fraud Summit, hosted by the Home Secretary, kicked off Monday (March 11) with the novel concept of taking faster payments, and slowing them down by a lot.
Under the proposed new draft law, bank transfers and payments could be delayed for up to four days if fraud is suspected, in order to allow any illicit activity to be properly investigated.
In an ironic twist, the U.K. is one of the original birthplaces of real-time payments — with the nation making faster payments a requirement in 2008 through the Faster Payments System (FPS) initiative, which reduced payment times between different banks’ customer accounts to around a few seconds, down from the three working days that transfers usually take.