July 2025 saw Australian banks unveil their version of scam fighting technology
Confirmation of Payee, allowing names to be matched to accounts and preventing customers from being tricked into sending funds to fraudsters. Forming part of the
Scam-Safe Accord – a joint initiative of the Australian Banking Association (ABA) and the Customer Owned Banking Association (COBA) – banks have invested $100 million into this new technology.
Australian Banking Association CEO Anna Bligh highlights that while scam losses are
reducing in Australia, investing into Confirmation of Payee is crucial to driving those losses down even further. “When the rollout is complete, Australia will be one of only a handful of countries to have this technology in place across the entire banking
sector, ensuring customers are protected regardless of who they bank with. It is further proof that Australian banks are leading the way when it comes to protecting customers from scams.”
Customer Owned Banking Association chair Elizabeth Crouch adds that customer-owned banks “put their customers first and are committed to doing everything they can to deliver effective fraud and scam protections that work for their customers and communities.”
In conversation with Finextra, Adrian Lovney, chief payments and schemes officer at
Australian Payments Plus, which developed the service, shares that before 2022, scams had been
“rising significantly” with losses topping $3 billion. The Scam-Safe Accord helped to unite all Australian retail banks in their scam prevention and customer protection efforts by outlining a minimum set of anti-scam controls that banks must implement.
This includes preventing scams before they happen, improving scam detection and intelligence sharing, and acting quickly and consistently when scams occur.
The industry-wide $100 million investment, as Lovney explains, was required for the “design, build and testing of the Confirmation of Payee service for all financial institutions to leverage to help protect their customers.” But how does this compare to
other CoP initiatives around the world, how will cross-bank compatibility occur, and what does this mean for the future of fraud prevention in Australia?
How does Australia’s CoP compare to similar programmes in the UK, EU and Asia?
While CoP in Australia is in the early stages of being rolled out, as Lovney reveals, the success of the initiative in other countries has been recorded. For instance, “the Netherlands has reported an 81% reduction in impersonation fraud and 67% drop in
misdirected payments after a similar Confirmation of Payee system was introduced. And the UK has recorded a 32% reduction in invoice scams, 30% reduction in investment scams and 30% reduction in impersonation scams since Confirmation of Payee was introduced
in 2020.”
At the time of the launch, AP+ explained how the new Australian Confirmation of Payee service will apply when a customer makes a first-time payment using a BSB – a six-digit number that helps to identify the individual branch of the financial institution,
similar to a sort code in the UK - and account number.
After the account name and payment details are entered, but before the payment is made, the CoP matching service will check whether the information matches the recipient's bank data. If there is a match, the account name will be displayed. The same will
occur if there is a close match and the customer can confirm if the name on the file is correct. For individual accounts with no match, the customer will see a warning but won’t be shown the account name, to help protect privacy. The customer is in control,
and they decide if they want to make the payment or pause and check the details again.
Speaking to Finextra, Lovney explains that the Australian model is based on the UK initiative, where it has “significantly reduced scams and mistaken payments since its introduction in 2020. It's become a key part of the UK’s national anti-fraud strategy,
and similar systems are now being adopted across parts of Europe and Asia.”
However, Lovney believes that what sets the Australian CoP service apart is the “scale and complexity of the rollout. Confirmation of Payee is being implemented across more than 100 banks, credit unions and payment providers, many of which operate on different
systems and platforms. Despite that complexity, Australia’s industry has come together to deliver a single, standardised, real-time solution for customers.”
He adds that “Australia is setting a new benchmark for coordinated industry action against scams and mistaken payments, and this proactive, industry-wide approach is being closely watched by other countries.”
How was Australia’s CoP initiative delivered?
Collaboration was crucial to the successful development of Australia’s Confirmation of Payee, and as Lovney explains, a coordinated partnership between AP+, ABA, COBA and individual financial institutions was essential. “The initiative required banks of
all sizes – from major banks to regional and customer-owned banks – to work together, sharing information and aligning technical standards, security protocols, and customer experience design. This level of cross-industry collaboration is unprecedented in scale
and complexity in Australia’s payments system.”
Working towards widespread success, AP+ also consulted community advocacy groups to gain insights into how the design could be improved to serve vulnerable populations such as the “elderly, First Nations, rural communities and individuals from non-English
speaking backgrounds,” as Lovney says. AP+ also worked with Pay.UK throughout the process to understand key learnings and to ensure a broad range of use cases were considered early on in the design.
Lovney also reiterates the importance of customer education that is led by individual banks and payment providers. This will encourage “customers to pay attention to the match outcome shown when they make a payment to a first-time payee. Especially in case
of a close match or no match result, customers should pause and double check the information before deciding whether to proceed with the payment. Over time, we hope Confirmation of Payee will encourage greater vigilance.”