Interview on 6PR about new scams campaign

Oliver Peterson (Host): Extra protections from the banks to shield you from scams are going to be front and centre of a new campaign, which has been launched today by the Australian Banking Association. Joining me on the line is its CEO, Anna Bligh, good afternoon. 

Anna Bligh (Guest): Good afternoon. How are you? 

Oliver Peterson: I’m good. Thank you, Anna, the fight against scams never stops. 

Anna Bligh: You’re absolutely right. I think I speak for just about every Australian when I say we wake up in the morning, and more often than not, there’s something that’s come to us overnight that’s asking us to click on a link that we haven’t paid a toll, the tax office wants money from us, we should be contacting our banks fraud team. We are in a constant war now with some of the world’s most sophisticated international criminal gangs, and that means that banks together have to step up to the mark and take the war to the scammers, and that’s just what we’re doing with a range of initiatives. Doesn’t matter whether you bank with one of the big four or one of Australia’s smallest credit unions or building societies, some of the work that we’re doing together is just that, working together to put a wall up of protection around customers wherever we can. 

Oliver Peterson: So, this scam safe accord now comes into place, and probably the biggest change is this massive investment, $100 million into the confirmation of a new payee system. How does that secure customers to try and make sure that they’re not going to become victims of scams? How’s that going to work? 

Anna Bligh: Yeah, well, I should say there’s lots of different scams out there, and there’s no silver bullet that’s going to fix them all. But I think many people are surprised to find that when you put in, you know, Ollie Peterson, I want to pay you, and here’s your bank account number that there’s no matching done, that those two things are actually the right account for that person’s name. And I should say, banks have now agreed that we will invest in this on a system wide basis. So again, doesn’t matter who you bank with. When you put in the name and the number, there will be a technology solution to work out if that matches, and if it doesn’t, you’ll get a traffic light system. Red, this is not a match, please go and double check the name and the number, orange says, this is a very low rated match, you might want to go and think about it, green is you can reliably send that, transfer that money. When we have this built, we’re currently in build phase, and when it’s built, we will be either the third or the fourth country in the world to have such system wide technology in place.  

Oliver Peterson: Yeah, that’s important obviously, because you get those examples, and our listeners have told us before they might get an email that’s pretending to say, as you mentioned, there, Anna, it could be pretending to be me, but it’s got a different BSB or account number that time, because the scam has been able to intercept it. So, all those little changes that can be made, just so important to give people the opportunity to pause and reflect before sending that money. 

Anna Bligh: Absolutely and you know, one of the more common scams that it will hopefully make a big difference to, and many of your listeners might have either paid a tradie or they’re a tradie that’s missed a payment because scammers have intercepted the invoice on the way to the customer. The customer honestly believes they’ve paid the plumber, but you know that the invoice had the plumbers name on it, but the hackers have gone in and changed the number. The other thing that banks are now doing is, and some of your listeners will have already started to experience some of this, others will experience it more in coming months, but introducing a lot more friction into the payment system. So instead of real time payments going through very smoothly, where you have either a new payee that you’ve never paid before or it might be a very large sum of money, banks are now either delaying that payment by a period of time, or they’re putting up questions, saying this is an unusual payment for you, are you sure you want to make it? Or putting a delay in the system and contacting you about it. So for some customers, that’s going to feel a little less convenient, but those delays, those warnings, that friction is now being designed back into the system so that one, you might be prompted to think before you press send, or importantly, if you get off the phone and think I’ve got a bad feeling about this, you ring your bank, it means that they know where the money is. It’s still in your account because they didn’t send it straight away. And hopefully, again, for people who answer the phone, get a scammer who panics them into transferring money to somewhere they shouldn’t, that will help in the recovery process. 

Oliver Peterson: And Anna, have you had much success in collaboration and cooperation between all of the banks in sharing this sort of technology in the fight against scammers? Are they coming together? 

Anna Bligh: Look, I think it’s probably one of the most defining features of this next phase of the fight against scams is, as I said, it doesn’t matter whether you bank with the smallest building society in the country or the largest bank, they are all working on the same things. And most importantly, as I said, this is a war, and in any war, intelligence matters. And in addition to the changes around your transferring payments, they’ve also invested in a very substantial new technology platform that allows banks, big and small, to literally in real time, share information that they see about scams so they can immediately send, here’s the bank account number that one of my customers just sent scam money to by mistake or because they were tricked, the bank that has this account number, you need to freeze it and investigate it so that, gradually, step by step, we are closing all of the loopholes that scammers can exploit. So that sharing of information is a really important tool to shut down some of, as I said, some of the loopholes or the back doors that scammers try to exploit. 

Oliver Peterson: Really important stuff. Anna Bligh, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. 

Anna Bligh: Thanks a lot. Ollie. 

Oliver Peterson: She is the CEO of the Australian Banking Association. 

Ends 

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