A pan-European fraud taxonomy : Do you speak fraud?

Understanding the myriad activities of fraudsters, and finding effective measures to rapidly counteract them, continues to be a vexing problem for payment service providers (PSPs) — a challenge that is being intensified by the move to a 24/7/365 and real-time payments environment. To strengthen the fraud detection and prevention tools available to PSPs, there are growing efforts within the industry to create a pan-European ecosystem for sharing fraud data and intelligence, facilitated by regulatory and legislative developments. To ensure that the benefits of these new tools can be fully reaped, this paper argues that there is a need for PSPs to get their own houses in order by harmonising the fragmented fraud terminologies and internal reporting requirements in practice today. By leveraging the Euro Banking Association (EBA) Fraud Taxonomy — a common pan-European vocabulary for fraud categorisation — PSPs can ensure their data are not just comparable across the European ecosystem, but also granular and actionable. This paper contends that the move to this pan-European fraud taxonomy will serve as a foundational step in the introduction of fraud data sharing solutions.