Verification Of Payee (VOP) is now supported by BankingLab

We are proud to announce that BankingLab has successfully added support for Verification Of Payee (VOP) scheme to its banking core and payment orchestration platform. As a result of our team’s regulatory and technological expertise, we can ensure our clients compliance with VOP scheme and enable them to  further solidify the security of their end-users SEPA Credit (SCT) and SEPA Credit Instant Transfers (SCT Inst).

What is VOP and why does it matter?

The VOP scheme became mandatory for SEPA Instant Credit Transfers on 9th October 2025 due to EU Instant Payments Regulation. In technical terms the scheme allows the PSP of the payer (the Requesting PSP) to instantly send to the PSP of the payee (the Responding PSP) a request to verify the IBAN and the name of the payee as given by the payer (the Requester).

Therefore, as of 9th October, once a sender initiates any SEPA transfer and enters the receiver’s details, the sender’s financial institution (bank, electronic money institution or payment institution) will follow the VOP scheme by asking the receiver’s financial institution to verify receiver’s details (IBAN and name). In other words,  the sender’s financial institution will ask the receiver’s financial institution if the name of the owner of the account linked to that specific IBAN is the same (or similar) to the one entered by the sender. As a result the sender will be presented with one of the following match responses before confirming the payment:

• Match: The name of the payee (receiver) and the name of the owner of the account associated with the IBAN match completely.
• Close Match: There are some minor differences between the name of the payee (receiver) and the name of the owner of the account associated with the IBAN (e.g. spelling variation, order of name/surname etc.)
• No match: The name of the payee (receiver) and the name of the owner of the account associated with the IBAN do not match. 
• Not applicable: Verification check not possible, most often when IBAN could not be found (i.e. is not issued by a receiving financial institution) or payee’s PSP is not responsive.

Thus, with the adoption of VOP, clients of financial institutions in the Euro area will be warned that they might be transferring funds to the wrong person, especially in the case of no match. This reduces the danger of fraudsters and helps avoid wrongly sent payments due to human mistakes (e.g. typos).

Most importantly, VOP scheme is a EU-wide receiver’s name and IBAN check mechanism whose goal is to repeat the success of already existing national schemes (Confirmation of Payee in the UK and IBAN-Naam check in the Netherlands and Belgium) and enhance the safety of payment transfers for its 450 million inhabitants. As both the UK and Netherlands have achieved tangible success with aforementioned schemes (fraud reduction rates ranging from 18% to 81%, according to the payments software firm Bottomline Technologies), EU-wide adoption of VOP mechanism is a fundamental step in terms of strengthening consumer trust in SCT and SCT Inst payment systems.

Compliance updates with ease – a BankingLab approach

Here at BankingLab, we do not view ourselves as simply technical providers, but most importantly our clients’ strategic partners who are continuously following the regulatory landscape in the payments industry. As we understand the importance of continuous adherence to ever-developing regulations, our approach is to meticulously plan the adoption of necessary compliance solutions into our banking software suite and avoid last-minute deployments.

Our development roadmap is thus based on three pillars: continuous monitoring of the regulatory environment, proactive analysis of required changes, and immediate start of development efforts once any particular regulation is announced to become mandatory in the future.

Therefore, once the European Payments Council (EPC) announced a first version of VOP scheme rulebook in October 2024, BankingLab immediately began the analysis of required implementation and proactively covered the gaps by collaborating with European Payments Council, members of the European Central Bank (ECB) and our clients. By leading the communication between all aforementioned stakeholders, our team defined clear exemption cases and prepared for testing and implementation substantially in advance of the indicated deadline. This has been done to ensure that implementation of the scheme would not degrade the user experience when making the payments, but rather enhance it instead. As a result, we have prepared a plug-and-play VOP solution which is seamlessly integrated into our banking software suite.

Implementation –  testing, testing and testing once again

As BankingLab’s partners are financial institutions, any new developments need to be tested to perfection before releasing them to production in order to ensure frictionless user experience. This is even more true regarding compliance updates, as each of our clients is regulated and cannot afford technology failures to affect their compliance processes.

That is why the team of BankingLab was scrupulously testing our VOP solution directly with one of the member banks of the ECB in order to ensure that all bugs affecting the proper functioning of the VOP scheme would be eradicated before deployment.

Although implementations of this type always present multiple edge cases that need to be tackled (e.g. not all financial institutions support certain letters from national languages in the case of payee’s or receiver’s name), BankingLab is equipped to swiftly identify these early in the testing process. As BankingLab is processing more than EUR 42 billion worth of payments  each year, it enables us to test new features efficiently and  point out most of the anomalies before they occur in the live environment and thus ensure the system’s robustness.

A modular solution tailored to every financial institution

To conclude, BankingLab’s subject matter expertise in the compliance field, careful planning, proactive analysis and efficient testing and implementation process led to a painless rollout of VOP solution to all our clients. We are proud to once again announce a frictionless delivery of a crucial technical development needed to power our clients’ payments operations in a compliant way.

Moreover, this solution is implemented on BankingLab’s newest product – payment orchestrator. This means that we are ready to deploy a fully compliant VOP mechanism not only to existing clients which are using our BankingLab Core platform, but also to other financial institutions running on different technology stacks.

Interested to hear more? Contact us:

Darius Latvys
Chief Commercial Officer
[email protected]