CASE STUDY
One of the biggest and fastest-growing global fraud risks is Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. With annual UK losses of almost £500 million, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) introduced market-wide obligations to reimburse victims of APP fraud (referred to as Authorised Push Payment Reimbursement – APPR).
Pay.UK, as the operator of the Faster Payment Service (FPS) in the United Kingdom, has a specific mandate from the PSR to incorporate APPR reporting under its regulatory obligations. Formed in 2017, initially as the New Payment System Operator (NPSO), Pay.UK provides the digital networks that make payments secure, safe and simple for the UK’s banks and building societies, payment providers and their customers. Its purpose is to power payments, champion innovation and give the UK choice in how it pays.
Launched with the aim of consolidating the three national retail payment schemes – Bacs, Faster Payment and the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company – Pay.UK enables individuals and organisations in the UK to transfer money to others whenever they need to, quickly, safely and cheaply.
Recognising that technology plays a pivotal role in the monitoring and prevention of digital financial fraud – including APPR fraud – Pay.UK required a modern, scalable data and reporting architecture to provide highly advanced real-time analytics of the UK’s payment transfer networks and APPR.
As the hub of UK retail payment exchanges, this critical need would ensure Pay.UK’s operations remained consistent for the long-term with the level of daily usage and trust expected by both the public and commercial users alike.
After an extensive procurement process, the Advania team successfully secured the opportunity to work with Pay.UK to deliver a comprehensive and secure Azure tenant and data reporting architecture that satisfied regulatory obligations and provided optimal functionality and security
Industry:
Financial services
Organisation size:
250-500 employees
Solutions:
Professional services, cyber, managed services, CSP licensing
Completion date:
December 2024
To comply with the regulatory mandate from the PSR, Pay.UK was seeking a robust, scalable and secure enterprise data storage, reporting and analytics solution.
Working with highly sensitive data, a critical component of Pay.UK’s needs was defence against proactive and constantly evolving cyber threats. A class-leading design that ensured a secure and reliable environment was a priority.
With a firm commitment to continually enhancing operations and guaranteeing the highest standards of data management, Pay.UK were keenly aware of the need to strive for consistently effective client delivery through enhanced data management processes and further improved solutions offering optimal real-time decision making.
Pay.UK saw Advania as the perfect partner to deliver improvement and growth on their existing operations, and to balance the maintenance of a business-as-usual model with the modernisation and innovation of a new source data platform to adapt to current threat realities.
Advania proposed and implemented a robust and secure Azure environment, based on Microsoft Cloud Scale Analytics. This flexible framework helps organisations create modern data platforms according to their specific needs.
With Advania’s expertise as a specialised Microsoft Data Partner, Microsoft UK provided direct financial support for the project through Microsoft’s Azure Innovate funding which allowed the work to start quickly and ensuring the budget for the project would be sufficient to ensure all outcomes could be met in the first phase.
For Pay.UK, the solution included the following key components:
Data Landing Zone: A secure SFTP enabled data lake to act as the initial landing zone for fraud reimbursement data.
Modern Data Platform: The complete delivery of a Microsoft Fabric data platform solution including the capacity, workspace and deployment pipeline configurations and Power BI Premium.
ETL Processes: Designed and implemented the full ETL processes to ingest data into the Fabric Lakehouse and refine the data as it moves through the medallion architecture designed layers.
Data Modelling: Developed a Gold (refined) layer of the Lakehouse for consumption via semantic models to report on the Fraud re-imbursement data.
CICD: Configuration of the Dev Ops integration for the development workspaces along with the deployment pipelines and deployment rules.
Dynamics 365: The creation of a secure registration page for PSP’s using Power Pages (part of the Power Platform suite) and D365 CRM for contact management.
Governance: A data management landing zone consisting of secure key Vaults, Azure security and monitoring solutions and a comprehensive set of purview solutions to govern, protect and manage the data.
Support: A fully managed Azure service focussed on supporting the data, analytics, and infrastructure to maximise business value.
Advania and Pay.UK have had a long-standing partnership commencing with the design, build and support of SharePoint Server in 2014 and the migration into and adoption of Microsoft 365 in 2021.
As a regulated organisation working in the financial services sector, Pay.UK have long understood the importance of investing in technology solutions to meet evolving regulatory and stakeholder requirements.
Programmes currently being defined included,
Extension of the Data Platform for additional data sources and application modernisation
Copilot and CoPilot Studio enablement
SharePoint Online modernisation and application refactoring
Purview data classification
D365 CRM development to support stakeholder contact and process management.
Business Change & Adoption support
Advania delivered a new, scalable analytics platform using Microsoft Fabric, with the project commencing in July 2024 and production-ready by December.
The opportunity was supported by Microsoft Innovate Funding and applications submitted by Advania.
Following build and deployment, Advania and Pay.UK contracted for a 3-year Managed Data Platform Service to ensure the solution remains optimised
Damola Da Silva
IT MANAGER, RIBBY HALL VILLAGEHead of Data & Analytics
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