Payments on Hold | Scam Prevention

Industry Context
Scammers are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to defraud customers, often moving stolen funds in near real time using Osko-enabled accounts. This makes it much harder to recover money once it leaves the victim’s account. The New Payments Platform (NPP) effectively provides scammers with the perfect “getaway car” after they’ve convinced someone to send them their hard-earned funds.

Business Context
To help protect our customers from scams and fraud, we needed to “buy time” for them to pause and consider whether they might be the target of a scam. In essence, this meant introducing a temporary hold on outbound NPP payments.

My Role
This was a large, complex change, made even more challenging because the new payment behaviour had to be deployed simultaneously on the mobile app—posing significant capacity issues that we overcame with good old-fashioned teamwork.

I was one of three Product Owners responsible for gathering requirements and facilitating Q&A sessions, walkthroughs, and workshops with stakeholders across the business. The feature attracted extensive feedback, from UX design considerations to how we planned to communicate the changes to customers.

Given the heavy compliance component, there were many rounds of detailed reviews with our legal and risk teams. We spent significant time carefully defining what we needed to tell customers, when to tell them, and how to ensure they understood why a payment was being held and what steps to take next.

I led the work through to the code-complete and end-to-end testing milestones before transitioning to a new role outside of Suncorp Bank.

Outcome
The Payments on Hold feature was successfully released in March 2025. Although I moved on before its release, I’m proud to have contributed to this important initiative designed to help protect customers from scams.