Where central banks are inviting fraudster

In end of December 2024 the Sveriges riksbank is extending the domestic real time payments system, RIX Inst, to enable bank initiated account to account payments. Already the SWISH wallet has moved its clearing and settlement to this platform.

Where SWISH and many other wallets and peer-to-peer solution are adopting an alias service to enable the sender of payments to actually pre-validate the name of the payee this new service that the Central Bank is launching will not have any such service, enabling the fraudster to have a window of opportunity to move their activities. The Swedish financial system has seen a huge increase in fraud where user of Swish has in various ways managed to instruct unknowing user to transfer amount to fraudulent accounts. With this new RIX Inst service I foresee that there is a significant risk that just move their activiites off SWISH to use the banks as the next target.

As in with most recent announcement of central banks, and the Swedish central bank in particular, expect that the industry (eg. banks) would need to adress this issue. The central bank has also made it clear if the industry does not rapidly progress on making the batch payments compliant with the Wire transfer regulation, WTR, they would open to intervene in the market to ensure a safe and reliable money movement.

Clearly the central banks around the world and Bank for International Settlements – BIS seem very determined to deliver on the G20 vision of the future of payments. Lately announcement has been made by many central banks to enable interoperability of regional real time payment system.

This motion is also making the money movement a governmental and state controlled model, especially movement of cross border payments (both for cards and account based payments) has been for the private industry to solve and develop. What central banks are NOT adressing is how the system should be used, and that it must be protected. However they are taking very limited responsibility for offering remedy. As the announcement by the Riskbank they expect the banks to deal with the tricky part and those things may end up getting bad publicity in the press.

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/press-and-published/notices-and-press-releases/press-releases/2024/more-payments-than-swish-can-now-reach-recipients-instantly/