As of October 7, 2024, payment service providers (PSPs), including South West Foreign, have to adhere to rules issued by the Payment Systems Regulator stating PSPs must fully reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud up to a value of £85,000.

This means that if, for whatever reason, funds we send out on your behalf end up in the wrong account due to fraudulent activity, then up to £85,000 can be reimbursed by you, subject to certain criteria being met.

Following this announcement from the regulator, there have been various articles in the press regarding fraud incidents that have taken place, mainly involving the major banks and those other organisations that don’t verbally communicate with their clients. If you use a company for any type of money transfer or exchange that doesn’t communicate by telephone personally, then we would advise you not to use them.

FX companies and fraud

I agree with other FX companies in believing this fraudulent activity could have been prevented if greater communication had taken place between the parties and more care was taken to ensure the destination of funds was bona fide and correct.

The reason for these types of fraud lies mainly with those parties who, when setting up new beneficiaries, do not take the necessary steps to eliminate fraud. So many of them do not have any verbal contact with their clients and certainly do not have the one-to-one relationship that we offer to make sure fraud does not occur.

We, at SWFX, through 15 years of operations and having made thousands of payments., have not once had a fraud claim lodged against us for loss of funds. The reason for this is, firstly, good communication and, secondly, we educate all our clients in making sure that the details they pass us are bona fide by asking them to verbally verify them with their suppliers to guarantee they are correct.

We stress the word VERBALLY. There is no point, when receiving new banking information, to verify it via email as the fraudster is usually using that exact communications platform. They can tap into email streams and change the bank details on an open email or even change the bank details on an attached PDF invoice making it all look very legitimate.

No matter how or who you are communicating with, it is always essential that you verbally verify the bank information sent to you to make sure it is correct before you send any money to anyone. This is the only way to mitigate fraud and this is what we make sure all our clients do before we verify the same information with them.

Making overseas payments?

If fraud is an issue for you or your company and you are making a small or large number of domestic and/or overseas payments, then we can help you. Not just by making payments but also offering a full foreign currency exchange and risk management service to make sure you are risk and fraud free.

You also will have access to our multi-currency virtual IBAN accounts that are integrated directly into our foreign exchange services. That means you can manage, maintain and distribute funds in up to 39 currencies from one single account.

As we all know, fraud is everywhere these days and even though sometimes we are advised not to speak to people we don’t know or to give too much information to an unknown source, we like to think we have at least a few of those bases covered. Communicating, sometimes daily, with our customers helps both parties get to know each other well and makes sure that we are a familiar voice on the phone able to help and assist whenever possible.

If anyone would like to discuss the range of services we have on offer we are, of course, available to speak with on 01548 857009 or do drop us an email on tim@swfx.co.uk and we will call you back.