Pay.UK Builds Fraud Reimbursement Platform in Just 8 Months
Allyship Snapshot
Use Cases
- Scalable national system
Solutions
- Secure identity directory
- API management platform
- Authentication and authorization engine
- Identity lifecycle management
- High-performance AWS cloud infrastructure
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Use Cases
- Ping Identity
- AWS
Together we
Fraud Victims Lose Trust in Digital Payments
Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud was costing UK consumers over £750 million a year. Victims were tricked into sending money to fraudsters—and had little hope of getting it back. Without a consistent reimbursement process, banks struggled to respond, and trust in digital payments began to erode.
To protect consumers, the Payment Services Regulator (PSR) introduced new rules: financial institutions must reimburse victims within five business days, with costs shared between sending and receiving banks. But the infrastructure to support this didn’t exist.
As the official operator of the UK’s retail interbank payment systems, Pay.UK was tasked with delivering two critical services, both of which had to be live in just eight months.
- Extend the Confirmation of Payee (CoP) account name-checking service to 400+ institutions
- Launch a Reimbursement Claims Management Service (RCMS) to support the new legislation
A Bold Shift to Protect Consumers at Scale
The leadership knew it needed more than just a technical fix. It needed a secure, scalable platform that could serve the entire financial ecosystem, meet strict compliance standards, and be delivered in just eight months.
Partnering with Ensono, Pay.UK reframed the challenge; not just to meet the deadline, but to set a new standard for fraud prevention and consumer protection. Rather than build separate point solutions for CoP and RCMS, Ensono designed and delivered an AWS-hosted, cloud-native Trusted Directory and API platform.
- Secure identity directory and API management platform: Acts as a trusted framework for financial institutions and PSPs to verify identities and share sensitive data. Amazon EKS provides the container platform for core identity, API, directory and routing services.
- Dynamic routing mechanism: Locates the correct API endpoint based on destination account information.
- Identity lifecycle management: Covers organizations, users, certificates, and software with a financial-grade authentication and authorization engine. AWS IAM and IAM Identity Center provide controlled, least-privilege access across the platform.
- Security engineered from the start: AWS KMS and Secrets Manager protect encryption keys, certificates and application secrets. AWS WAF and Shield protect internet-facing services, while CloudTrail, GuardDuty and Security Hub provide audit, threat-detection and security-monitoring capabilities.
- High-performance, resilient architecture: Production services were designed across multiple AWS Availability Zones, with critical EKS workloads distributed across three Availability Zones to increase resilience and reduce the impact of infrastructure or zone-level failures. The platform supports up to 200,000 institutions and 1 billion monthly API requests with millisecond response times.
- Compliance-first design: Adheres to FAPI, OWASP API Top Ten, and Open Banking standards.
- Accelerated delivery using Ensono Stacks: Leveraged open-source cloud frameworks to reduce risk and speed up implementation.
- Ongoing platform support: Ensono’s global SRE teams ensure stability, security, and performance for the long term, with defined recovery objectives and automated deployment capabilities designed to allow infrastructure and platform components to be rebuilt consistently.
Restoring Trust and Reshaping the Industry
The new platform didn’t just meet regulatory requirements, it transformed how fraud is managed across the UK’s financial ecosystem.
- Delivered against regulatory deadlines. CoP expansion and RCMS were delivered within the mandated programme timeline
- Over 900 institutions now support fast, fair fraud reimbursement
- Consumers receive compensation quickly, restoring trust in digital payments
- Secure data sharing helps prevent fraud before payments are made
- Automated workflows improve efficiency across the industry
- Built for future scale. The architecture has been designed to scale toward 200,000 organizations and one billion monthly API requests
- A foundation, not a point solution. Common identity, API, onboarding, certificate-management and security capabilities can be reused as Pay.UK introduces additional services
These changes have given consumers peace of mind and positioned Pay.UK as a leader in secure, scalable payment innovation.
“Partnering with Ensono enabled us to build these services from the ground up in under eight months, ensuring we delivered to the exact dates that were set by the regulator, which many in the industry thought would be unattainable. ”
— Chief Operations Officer, Pay.UK
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