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Verification of payee (VOP) for SEPA Payments
What is Verification of Payee?
Verification of Payee (VoP), often called Confirmation of Payee (CoP), is mechanism designed to verify if the name of a person or business you're trying to pay matches the name on the recipient's bank account.
This check happens before you send the money, helping to prevent fraud and misdirected payments.
The European Union introduced a new regulation which makes such verification mandatory before executing SEPA payments from 9 October 2025.
As a response the European Payments Council is developing a unified schema for applying this process across the payments industry.
Payment Service Providers (PSPs) and banks are developing automated services to provide this solution to all users across EU.
How this applies to your business?
The European Union issued Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) (Regulation (EU) 2024/886) directive which requires all Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in the EU to provide the VoP service for credit transfer by October 9, 2025.
Being able to verify the owner of the recipient IBAN before a payment is sent is an invaluable step towards effective and secure payments.
It reduces the risk of bounced and delayed payments due to incorrect recipient.
In theory VOP should eliminate the fraud practice of IBANs being replaced in fake or legitimate invoices making companies pay to a bad actor believing they are processing legitimate payment.
How we contribute to the process?
We have been providing payment validation solutions for over 10 years to businesses globally. In the context of Verification of Payee, we offer two different solutions for PSPs and end users.
IBAN to BIC: This is a key requirement by the industry in order for a PSP and VOP providers to be able to route the verification requests to the correct bank. The Verification of Payee schema requires service providers to determine the correct BIC address associated with an IBAN before performing the request. Our IBAN Suite service provides this functionality through fast and simple REST based API for automation.
Bank Account Verification (BAV) Service: This service is aimed towards the end user ( in our case companies processing payments ). The BAV service provides an API for performing Verification of Payee requests to businesses before initiating payments. The API allows for the process to be automated so corporate entities can benefit from the Verification of Payee process in securing their payment process.
What is required to make a VoP request?
First and foremost is payment intent. This term means that a company can make a Verification of Payee request only with the intent of initiating payment based on the result. The details required for European VOP request are IBAN and name. Name can be the personal name of an individual or company name in case the recipient is a business.
If you are interested in exploring our solutions, please feel free to visit our IBAN Suite Service and BAV Service service information pages.