Westpac SaferPay Qorus Reinvention Awards - APAC 2024-2025 - Winner

In 2023, Australian’s lost over $2.74B million to scams. Westpac endeavoured to create a feature that provides additional friction in the payments process to intercept potential fraudulent payments before being processed.

As an Australian banking first Westpac SaferPay is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to screen new payments made by customers.

How Westpac SaferPay works:

1. When making a payment, customers will be presented with a series of dynamic questions in instances where the payment is considered a higher risk of being a scam. 2. The questions will be activated if Westpac’s fraud systems detect a potential scam after payment details are entered into their online or mobile banking. 3. If customer responses suggest the payment is highly likely to be a scam, Westpac will not allow the payment to be processed. 4. The questions will continue to be adapted over time for added security as well as flexibility to quickly respond to new or emerging scam and behavioural trends.

In a short period of 2 months since the feature was made available to customers, over $1M has been saved for customers from confirmed and suspected scams. It has since been expanded to cover payment types across Mobile and Desktop banking channels and to business customers. Westpac has also reduced the number of mistaken internet payments – saving more time and effort for our customers and businesses.