APP scams reimbursement dashboard – how well is the UK responding to scam claims?

On the 16 July 2025, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) published its dashboard on the management of reimbursement claims since its policy was imposed on in-scope firms 6 months ago. It remains as a very topical area for payment, e-money firms and banks at the moment, with intrigue amongst the masses as to how industry has responded to the UK’s controversial APP fraud reimbursement proposal from the PSR since 07 October 2024; And so the PSR’s data report outlines an informative narrative on how well the payments sector is responding to APP scams - and indicates the ‘direction of travel’ for the coming months. The report provides statistics for Faster Payments system (FPS) transactions within the reporting period from 07 October 2024 to 31 March 2025 that provides two datasets from Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 for comparison. 

Generally, the data shows that firms are actively reimbursing victims of APP fraud meaning the reimbursement process operates in line with regulatory expectations and providing some relief to victims of scamming in the country; The total value of reimbursement awarded to claimants increased from £27.6 million in the previous quarter to £38.4 million in Q1 2025. This indicates a steady ascent to better victim compensation and industry’s willingness to adapt to an influential change in payments policy. Interestingly, it would be useful to see data on the costs to the payments sector in maintaining the reimbursement process, providing a vantage viewpoint of reimbursement in its entirety. 

It seems that consumer confidence in the reimbursement process had grown from the previous quarter in Q1 2025 to 26% as 62,600 reimbursement claims were reported by firms on the Reimbursement Claims Management System (RCMS) via reporting standard A. However, from these claims, only 30% of these claims were reimbursable amounting to 43,600 victims receiving reimbursement pay-outs. One reason for this may be that some firms may consider the facts of the APP scam to better align with the requirements of a civil dispute claim, excluding it from eligibility for reimbursement.

The data shows that more reimbursement claims were submitted to firms in Q1 2025 and 43.6% of those were actually reimbursable, with the others being rejected as the claim had fallen outside the scope of reimbursement (as per the PSR’ definition). While its disappointing news for the customer, some firms’ chose to reimburse the customer through their internal dispute management policies, though this may not be submitted as reportable data on the RCMS to Pay.UK.

When investigating claims, most firms were reported to have adhered to the ‘5 business day’ requirement to close or respond to claims with 88% in Q1 2025, producing a slight increase of 6% from the previous quarter. The remaining 12% who had not responded to claimants within the timelines had not met the eligibility requirements for claiming reimbursement. 

In terms of scam awareness, there was a slight increase of 1% in Q1 2025 indicating customers were not being ‘cautious enough’ in meeting the standard of caution test within the investigation, resulting in a further 500 rejected complaints from the 1,100 reported in Q4 2024. In terms of total rejected claims, 3% of those were dismissed due to the consumer not reasonably demonstrating vigilance in identifying their transaction as fraudulent, or they hadn’t co-operated appropriately with the sending/receiving firm in the claims process.

While the data provides useful indications of APP fraud management to policy standards by industry, it mustn’t necessarily be viewed prima facie as it has been analysed by the PSR in line with its definition of APP fraud and reimbursement only (as per its consultations and Specific Direction 20). Comparatively, the data from UK Finance has a broader definition which could provide different results and perspective on reimbursement progress e.g. claims involving international payments or non-FPS payments may be included in UK Finance calculations but not in PSR’ metrics.