Last week, after a four-year stint, managing director Chris Hemsley stepped down from the PSR, replaced on an interim basis for nine months by David Geale.

Hemsley had been overseeing plans to improve protections for victims of APP (authorised push payments) fraud that will see the vast majority of money – up to £415,000 – lost to APP frauds reimbursed to victims.

With the new rules set to come into force in October 2024, the UK Payments Association has used the arrival of Geale to call for a 12 month postponement “to ensure the right policies, technology and systems are in place to avoid permanent damage to the UK’s payment industry and its ability to enable safe, instant, cheap and convenient payments”.

A briefing paper put together by the industry group argues that a delay to the reimbursement rules will let the industry prepare as well as bring in Big Tech – which it has long said is the source of APP scams – into the process.

The briefing also reiterates the industry’s stance that the threshold should be £30,000, not £415,000. With the average scam costing £11,000 for business and £1,500 for members of the public, a recommended mandatory reimbursement threshold of £30,000 is still more than double the average scam for businesses and 20x the average scam for consumers.

The Association last month wrote to the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Bim Afolami, to protest the cap, calling it “simply not proportionate,”

Riccardo Tordera, head, policy and government relations, Payments Association, says: “If the current changes are implemented, we believe the prudential risk and requirements to participate in the UK payments market will increase significantly – resulting in reduced competition and an increase in the unbanked population.

“It will also result in an increase in cost and friction of real time payments and a decrease in investment into the UK Fintech market due to higher risks of failure and lower profitability.”