EBA makes Fraud Taxonomy publicly available

The Euro Banking Association (EBA) has made publicly available the EBA Fraud Taxonomy, a pan-European taxonomy for payment fraud types.

The taxonomy has been developed by the Association’s expert group on payment fraud-related topics to support collective and individual fraud combatting efforts in the European payments ecosystem.

A common framework for detailing fraud

The EBA Fraud Taxonomy provides a simplified and straightforward framework to describe fraud scenarios related to all kinds of payments, including card transactions. It helps banks and other payment service providers to harmonise the categories they use for the description of fraud types.

Officials from the EBA stated that a common vocabulary for fraud types is an important prerequisite for sharing intelligence or data with peers for fraud prevention and detection purposes. Their fraud taxonomy enables payments experts to identify the who, how, and what of different fraud scenarios and to separate the contact methods used by fraudsters from the actual tricks they apply.

Understanding regulations and implementing them

Where possible, the EBA Fraud Taxonomy uses definitions based on authoritative and publicly available sources. It is also aligned with the fraud definitions provided by the European Banking Authority Guidelines on Fraud Reporting under PSD2. First implementation initiatives involving the EBA Fraud Taxonomy have been started in different contexts at PSP-individual, national, and regional level – and for different use cases: fraud reporting, intelligence sharing, and data sharing. 

The mission of the EBA is to foster dialogue and experience exchange amongst payments industry practitioners towards a pan-European vision for payments. It pursues this mission through involving member organisations and relevant stakeholders in thought leadership on innovation, helping its members to understand and implement regulation and by supporting the development of market practices. The EBA has more than 160 members from the European Union and across the world.