Sebastian Bogdan, Director of the Non-Bank Institutions Department at the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (UKNF), appeared at the opening of the 12th edition of the Payment Services Forum.

At the beginning of his address, Sebastian Bogdan noted that although the Forum took place under the banner of the Polish Bank Association (ZBP), banks and their clients were not the only participants in the payment services market.

He stated that the KNF Board looked at the payment services market mostly through the lens of supervision with the primary goal to ensure the safety of the money of the payment service users. He mentioned activities conducted to prevent fraudulent transactions and new consumer fraud risks that come with innovations.

He also referred to the proposals for new EU legislation (the PSD3/PSR package), highlighting the clearly visible trend towards increasing the protection of the payment service users. The best example is directly adopting in the PSR a provision – similarly to what has long been provided in the Polish regulations – that the refusal to reimburse the funds where a non-authorised transaction is reported will depend on the payment service provider proving that the transaction was authorised by the user and not, as it has so far been derived from the wording of the PSD2, only proving that the user was properly authenticated.

He also pointed to other proposed solutions, some too far-reaching, as it seems, that shifted the absolute responsibility of payment service providers for customer funds, such as making sure that the IBAN matched the last name of the payee or full compensation for losses caused by phishing fraud, consisting of posing as employees of those providers. 

Sebastian Bogdan also highlighted the importance of education of payment service users. The UKNF conducts a number of educational activities addressed both to youth and older people. The objective of those educational activities should be to convince customers to act with prudence and to make a sort of ‘intellectual effort’ when using payment services so they have a careful thought about whether a given service is used and operates properly.  

Sebastian Bogdan also said that despite the number of educational activities the scale of financial fraud was still increasing. Criminals manipulate the human behaviours which are not driven by rational thinking but are dictated by instincts, so it is difficult to defend oneself against such manipulation. As he stressed, in that context the top priority – apart from high usability, easy operability of payment services and user satisfaction – should be prevention and making fraud more difficult.

Summing up his speech, Sebastian Bogdan stated that the UKNF, as the supervisor, was an ‘active stakeholder’ in the payment services market, open to discussion and interested in developing good standards so the Polish payment services market continued to be the leader and to strengthen its position in the European market.