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There is no FPS message that allows you to unilaterally reverse a payment as a sending institution. It requires the consent of the receiving institution, and there’s no guarantee they’ll consent, or even have the ability to.

If the person receiving the money has moved it on, then it gone, FPS BER won’t save you. No receiving institution is going to voluntarily take on liability for another banks fuck up. At best they help you recover the money because the scheme makes them be helpful, but that’s no guarantee of actual recovery.




If someone drops their wallet by accident, and you take it, you are still stealing. The ultimate "source of truth" for payments is not the payment system, but the law, so if a payment was made in error, then the receiver has a legal responsibility to return the money.

> o receiving institution is going to voluntarily take on liability for another banks fuck up.

That's not how liability works at all...

If a large amount of money is erroneously deposited into your account, you don't get to keep it. Returning the money doesn't make you "liable" for anything, it's the opposite. If you spend that money, then you're going to have to pay it back, and if you can't, then you can end up in prison.


There’s a difference between the institution that receives the money, and the person that owns the account.

If the person owing the account move illegitimate find out of their account, then there’s nothing the receiving institution can do, they can’t return money no longer on their books. They could return money, and push the account owner into an overdraft, but now they’ve taken on the liability of recovering those funds. No bank is gonna do that voluntarily, especially to cover another banks fuck up.

Now the original sending bank could then ask the receiving bank who took the funds, and the receiving bank will tell the sending bank to come back with a court order, because they have a legal obligation to act in the best interest of their customer, even if they think their customer maybe doing something dodgy. Once the sending bank has rustled up a court order, then the receiving bank will hand over the account owners PII, and the sending bank can attempt to recover the money via the courts.

But a no point is the receiving institution ever going put their neck out to help a sending bank recover incorrectly sent funds. It’s the sending banks problem to use the legal system to both discover who received the funds, and pursue recovery directly from them. They can’t recover the funds from the receiving bank directly if the monies moved on and the account owner refuses to cooperate with the recovery process.

People forget there tends to be a very large gap between the law and its enforcement. Frequently it’s too much effort to actually enforce the law, so large sums just get written off instead.


BER is a process as part of the scheme rules. The banks have to at least attempt to recover the funds.

It's not a message but a file sent from sender to beneficiaries.




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