Conceptualising APP fraud risks through a critical realist/social positioning framework.

Instantaneous money transmission has long been associated as a key vector for Authorised Push Payment Fraud (“APPF”). In the UK, the Faster Payments Service (FPS), which offers round-the-clock settlement of electronic payments, now accounts for 98% of APPF transactions. Yet debates over the control of APPF have largely overlooked the technology of money transmission as an artefact of social development, and what alternative conceptions and solutions for maintaining trust and security could offer in modern payment system design.
This study follows Ingham (1996; 2004) and Lawson (2016, 2022, 2023) in conceptualising money, and the technological means of moving money, as fundamentally a social relation and by extension, an organising structure of human communities. Based on this assumption, relational contract theory (Macneil, 1987) differentiates between discreet exchanges of short duration and limited personal interactions, and long-term, enduring exchanges predicated on sustainable social relations of solidarity and reciprocity.
The study has three aims: first, to evaluate the features of FPS through the two poles of the discreet and the relational. Secondly, it compares FPS against two other culturally enduring payment mechanisms – hawala and feiqian – each of which leverages the organising structures of community relations to safeguard against risks in the payment journey. These so-called informal value transfer systems (“IVTS”) have long been associated with money laundering and terrorism financing risks owing to their ability to escape mass surveillance by law enforcement and the regulated financial sector. The final aim of the project is to consider this paradox and what relational alternatives to the control of APPF may entail.