Nextbank, SwiftPay urge banks to test fraud systems

Philippine banking technology company Nextbank and technology partner SwiftPay are urging financial institutions to assess the effectiveness of their fraud management systems as the sector moves beyond the June 2026 compliance deadline under Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Circular No. 1213.

The two companies will hold a free industry webinar on 25 November titled “Is Your FMS Actually Good? Twelve Questions to Ask,” introducing a 12-question self-assessment designed to help banks, cooperatives and electronic money issuers evaluate their existing fraud detection capabilities.

“The regulation deliberately does not publish a table of detection thresholds, and that is the point. Good is not a setting you copy from somebody. It means your rules describe your own customers, and your records can show how they got there,” said Łukasz Rączka, SwiftPay chief information officer and head of the engineering team behind its SwiftGuard fraud management solution.

The assessment is based on SwiftPay’s white paper, “The Defensible FMS,” and is designed to be vendor-neutral, allowing institutions to examine their systems regardless of technology provider.

Under BSP Circular No. 1213, supervised financial institutions must maintain fraud management capabilities suited to their risk profiles and continuously adjust them as transaction patterns and threats change.

Nextbank president and chief commercial officer James Allan To said smaller institutions must also ensure their transaction records can support coordinated verification of disputed transactions under BSP Circular No. 1215.

“Being below the P75 million threshold for Circular 1213’s FMS specification does not take an institution out of the framework or the process. When a disputed transaction touches a rural bank or cooperative bank, coordinated verification under Circular 1215 reads its records the same way it reads a universal bank’s. An institution of any size that can account for its records cleanly is in a strong position in that process,” To said.

The webinar will include a live walkthrough of the scorecard, helping participants identify gaps in fraud detection, response procedures and documentation.