Verification of Payee (VoP) is the check a bank performs, before you authorise a euro credit transfer, that the name you typed matches the account behind the IBAN. It was introduced by Regulation (EU) 2024/886, the Instant Payments Regulation, as a new Article 5c in the SEPA Regulation (EU) No 260/2012. Payment service providers in euro-area Member States have had to offer it since 9 October 2025; those in the other Member States must do so by 9 July 2027. It is free for the customer, it covers every euro credit transfer, instant or standard, and it runs on every channel, from a mobile app to a paper form.
The European Payments Council (EPC) built the scheme that banks use to exchange these checks with each other. Its rulebook took effect on 5 October 2025, four days before the legal deadline.
What Regulation (EU) 2024/886 requires
The regulation of 13 March 2024 amends Regulation (EU) No 260/2012 and inserts Article 5c, "Verification of the payee in the case of credit transfers". The obligations, with the paragraph they come from:
| Obligation | Where |
|---|---|
| The payer's PSP must offer a service that verifies the payee, immediately after the payer provides the payee details and before the payer can authorise the transfer, on every payment initiation channel | Art. 5c(1) |
| Where the payer entered an IBAN and a name, the payee's PSP checks on request whether they match; on a mismatch the payer is warned that the funds may go to an account not held by the intended payee; where they "almost match", the payer is shown the name actually associated with the IBAN | Art. 5c(1)(a) |
| For a legal person, the check may be against another unambiguous identifier instead of the name (a fiscal number, the European unique identifier of Directive (EU) 2017/1132, or an LEI), if the payee's PSP holds that data | Art. 5c(1)(b) |
| For accounts held on behalf of several payees, the PSP confirms whether the named payee is among them | Art. 5c(1)(c) |
| A payment initiation service provider that supplies the IBAN or the name must make sure it is correct | Art. 5c(2) |
| The check must not prevent the payer from authorising the transfer | Art. 5c(5) |
| Non-consumer customers may opt out when submitting multiple payment orders as a package, and may opt back in at any time | Art. 5c(6) |
| A PSP that performed the check correctly is not liable under Article 88 of PSD2 for a transfer to the wrong payee; a PSP that failed to perform it must refund the payer without delay | Art. 5c(8) |
| The service is free of charge | Art. 5b(2) |
Two definitions in the amended Article 2 matter for anyone who stores payee data. The "name of the payee" is, for a natural person, the name and surname, and for a legal person, the commercial or legal name. A "payment initiation channel" is any method by which a payer can place a credit transfer order, including online banking, a mobile app, an ATM and the bank's premises.
Who must offer it, and from when
Article 5c applies to PSPs located in the EU for credit transfers in euro that fall under Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, which is to say SEPA credit transfers, instant or not. The dates in Article 5c(9):
| PSPs located in | Verification of Payee required by |
|---|---|
| A Member State whose currency is the euro | 9 October 2025 |
| A Member State whose currency is not the euro | 9 July 2027 |
The same regulation obliged euro-area PSPs to receive SEPA Instant Credit Transfers by 9 January 2025 and to send them by 9 October 2025, with later dates for the non-euro Member States. Recital 20 explains the pairing: the payer may not be able to recover the funds before they are credited, so the moment to catch a wrong payee is before authorisation.
The regulation binds providers in the EU (the text is marked as EEA relevant). Banks in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the other non-EEA SEPA countries are outside it, although the EPC is consulting on extending the scheme to non-EEA participants in its version 2.0 (see below).
Match, close match, no match, and when no check is possible
The regulation describes outcomes in words ("match", "almost match", "do not match"). The EPC rulebook turns them into response types that the payee's bank (the Responding PSP) returns to the payer's bank (the Requesting PSP):
| Response | What the payer sees |
|---|---|
| Match | No warning; the rulebook only obliges the bank to pass on results other than a Match |
| Close Match with the name of the payment counterparty | The name actually on the account, so the payer can decide whether it is the intended one |
| No Match | A warning that authorising may send the funds to an account not held by the intended payee |
| Verification check not possible | The same warning as for No Match, plus (where the API gives one) the reason the check failed: an IBAN the responding bank does not hold, an incomplete IBAN, the service being unavailable |
| Identification code not supported or known | Only for legal-person checks against a fiscal number, LEI or similar: the responding bank cannot check that identifier |
On a close match, the responding bank discloses only the name of the account holder that was asked about, never the names of other holders of the same account. The requesting bank must pass the response on unaltered, and if no response arrives within the maximum execution time it treats the result as "verification check not possible" and may offer the payer a retry.
Neither the regulation nor the rulebook defines how close a close match is. The EPC publishes recommendations for the matching process (EPC288-23) rather than a fixed algorithm, so two banks can disagree about whether "J. Smith" is a close match for "John Smith". Recital 21 of the regulation names the cases the close match exists for: diacritics, transliterations between alphabets, and the gap between the name a person uses and the one on their documents.
The EPC Verification Of Payee scheme
The legal text says what must happen; the EPC scheme says how banks talk to each other to make it happen.
- Rulebook. Verification Of Payee Scheme Rulebook EPC218-23, 2024 version 1.0, issued on 10 October 2024, effective 5 October 2025 at 03:30 CET. A version 1.1 with errata and clarifications was published on 16 March 2026 and is scheduled to take effect on 20 September 2026. A version 2.0, with 27 change requests under public consultation until 30 June 2026, is planned for publication in November 2026 and for go-live in November 2027.
- Scope. A VoP request concerns an intended SEPA Credit Transfer or SEPA Instant Credit Transfer to an account at a PSP in SEPA. The request carries the IBAN plus either the name or an identification code.
- Timing. The requesting PSP must get the response within 5 seconds, "preferably 1 second or less", measured from a timestamp in the request. Participants can agree shorter limits bilaterally.
- Routing. Participants are listed in the EPC Directory Service (EDS), which holds adherence data and API endpoints; both sides must check the other's participation there. Banks can connect directly or through Routing and/or Verification Mechanisms (RVMs), which can route requests and even answer them on a responding bank's behalf without relieving that bank of its obligations. The request and response themselves are an API call between banks, defined in the Inter-PSP API Specifications, separate from the payment message.
- Adoption. EPC figures presented to the ECB in May 2026 show 2,768 PSPs and 58 RVMs adhering to the scheme, 2,743 of the PSPs in the euro area.
Scheme participation is for PSPs. A software company, a fintech without a payment licence or a corporate treasury does not call the VoP API directly; it uses what its PSP exposes.
What this means for developers
If you build a payment initiation screen inside a PSP. The check runs after the payee fields are complete and before the authorise button does anything. The response must be shown as received, the payer must still be able to proceed after a No Match, and the warning text has legal weight because of Article 5c(7) and (8): the payer who ignores it carries the loss. Log the response and what the user did next.
If you are a payment initiation service provider. Article 5c(2) makes you responsible for the correctness of the IBAN and name you hand to the bank, including payee data pre-filled from your own database.
If you send bulk payments. Corporate customers can opt out of VoP for batch files (Article 5c(6)). If you opt out, Article 5c(7) still requires the bank to tell you that funds may go to an account not held by the intended payee, and the liability sits with you. A payroll or supplier file with trading names instead of legal names will produce close matches and no matches, so clean the master data first.
If you store payee names. Keep the legal or commercial name for companies and name plus surname for people, with their diacritics. Recital 21 lists diacritics and transliteration as the typical causes of a close match; a name mangled by a legacy character set turns a match into a question for the payer.
If you test. A generated IBAN has no account behind it, so a VoP request for it comes back as "verification check not possible" with a reason such as account not found, or as No Match. That is the correct behaviour and a useful negative test case (the post on why valid IBANs get rejected has more on it). For positive cases you need your PSP's or RVM's sandbox, where test accounts carry known names; scheme participants also have the EPC's API Reference Toolbox for self-certification and a test environment of the EDS. For the structural layer (country, length, format, check digits, national check digits) the generator and validator here are enough, and the IBAN validation checklist lists the cases.
Realistic mode is the default on the generator: real bank codes for 84 countries and computed national check digits, so a fixture exercises the same code paths as production data without being a real account.
How it differs from UK Confirmation of Payee
The United Kingdom's Confirmation of Payee (CoP) is the older service and the obvious comparison, built on a different legal and technical footing.
| EU Verification of Payee | UK Confirmation of Payee | |
|---|---|---|
| Legal basis | Regulation (EU) 2024/886 (Article 5c of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012) | Payment Systems Regulator directions: Specific Direction 10 (2019) for the six largest banking groups, Specific Direction 17 (2022) extending it |
| Live since | 9 October 2025 for euro-area PSPs (9 July 2027 for the others) | 2020: the six largest groups were directed to send and respond by 31 March 2020, and the PSR took no formal action over delays until 30 June 2020 because of Covid-19; further groups by 31 October 2023 and 31 October 2024 |
| Operator of the scheme | European Payments Council | Pay.UK |
| Identifier checked | IBAN (plus name, or an identification code for legal persons) | Sort code and account number (plus name; accounts addressed with Secondary Reference Data are covered too) |
| Payments covered | Euro credit transfers under the SEPA Regulation, instant and standard, all channels | Faster Payments and CHAPS |
| Outcomes | Match, Close Match with name, No Match, Verification check not possible | Match, close match with the name, no match, or the check could not be completed |
| Can the payer proceed after a negative result? | Yes, with a warning and a shift in liability | Yes, with a warning |
| Scale | 2,768 PSPs adhering (April 2026) | Over 300 organisations, more than 2 million checks a day (Pay.UK) |
Both are name checks performed before authorisation, both return a close match with the real name, and neither blocks a determined payer. If you operate in both markets you will implement both, through different providers, and the account-matching logic cannot be shared because the identifiers differ.
Sources
- Regulation (EU) 2024/886 of 13 March 2024 (Instant Payments Regulation)
- Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, consolidated text with Articles 5a to 5d
- Directive (EU) 2015/2366 (PSD2), Article 88
- EPC, Verification Of Payee Scheme Rulebook (EPC218-23)
- EPC, Verification Of Payee Scheme Inter-PSP API Specifications
- EPC update on payment schemes and VOP deployment, ECB AMI-Pay meeting, 6 May 2026
- Payment Systems Regulator, Specific Direction 10 (Confirmation of Payee) and PSR Covid-19 updates
- Payment Systems Regulator, Specific Direction 17 (expanding Confirmation of Payee)
- Pay.UK, Confirmation of Payee