‘Ongoing Battle’ With Fraud: Nussle Asks Senate for Help

A Senate hearing on Tuesday focused on consumer fraud protection and specifically how the peer-to-peer payments platform Zelle and big banks might be failing in the fight against fraud.

Tuesday afternoon’s hearing titled “Instant Payments, Instant Losses: Zelle and the Big Banks Fail to Protect Consumers From Fraud” was conducted by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation and included testimony from representatives of the biggest banks.

Not included in the hearing: Credit unions.

Ahead of the hearing, America’s Credit Unions President/CEO Jim Nussle sent a letter to committee leaders expressing the importance of having a credit union perspective included on this issue, in part, because credit unions, those that do and do not use Zelle, are working hard to mitigate fraud.

Nussle wrote, “To address the root causes of payments fraud, relevant discussion should not be limited arbitrarily to a single platform. Nonbanks, fintechs, depositories, regulators and law enforcement are all partners in the global fight to prevent fraud. There are many other P2P services besides Zelle that facilitate digital consumer payments, but unlike Zelle they are not owned by insured depository institutions. While this distinction matters little for criminals, it should matter for consumers.”

“Today, the vast majority of transfers enabled by Zelle’s network are processed without issue,” he wrote. “However, fraud remains an ongoing battle, requiring consumers, institutions and government stakeholders to constantly adapt to new social engineering techniques that exploit weaknesses in human judgment. Scams that prey on the fallibility of consumers can leverage any channel for monetary gain — not just Zelle.

“Credit unions continue to make significant investments in security and fraud mitigation technologies to protect their members from scams and identity theft,” Nussle wrote.

While Nussle said he appreciated the effort by the subcommittee on the topic of fraud, he encouraged lawmakers “to consider solutions that leverage the experiences and insights of a broader range of stakeholders. Ideally, such solutions should aim to prevent fraud before it occurs and should include bolstering the resources of law enforcement, educating consumers about fraud and scam risks, and creating a level playing field between insured depository institutions and underregulated companies.”