Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Authorised Push Payment Fraud: Central Bank of Ireland

Mr. Wesley Murphy:

It is a case of setting the expectations first and being clear about them. Fraud is a key risk which applies across all firms. It is a risk to the system, to the firms as regards their resilience and to consumers. We do a sectoral risk assessment. We look at the key risks. We look at ourselves and how we try to measure and size the risks. We communicate this to the firms along with our expectations described by Mr. Kincaid. We expect firms to have effective measures in place to deal with the risks. To answer the question directly, we engage with the firms and ask them how they have done it. We carry out thematic reviews looking across firms, across different sectors we regulate or at an individual firm. We might do a targeted inspection. Across fraud it has taken some time to implement the frameworks for the payment services directive. Much of it has come from the EU. Firms have been implementing it, largely based on our guidance and what we measure. They have put in place fraud teams that deal with fraud generally and are trained to deal with APP fraud, which is the issue we are talking about. We look at each case on a case-by-case basis, engage with An Garda Síochána and recall the payments. Some of the measures of success are the quantitative factors we look at, such as the number of complaints made by consumers directly to the Central Bank and those that come in through the ombudsman when he takes decisions. We see the system as working if there are minimal complaints. We see reduced fraud measures through the data Deputy Doherty mentioned earlier, which the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland published. We are seeing reduced instances of fraud which means that the measures the banks are taking are effective to some extent. As the Deputy said, they are not-----