Europe has its first cross-border Confirmation of Payee service, thanks to a partnership between SurePay, SepaMail.eu and StreamMind. First cross-border IBAN-Name Check launched for payments between France and the Netherlands.
SurePay, SEPAMail.eu and StreamMind have today announced the launch of the first cross-border IBAN Check. This service enables companies and banks to check that the account information entered matches the intended beneficiary when initiating cross-border payments between France and the Netherlands and marks an important first step towards a pan-European solution in the fight against fraud.
The partnership links more than 30 Dutch banks and 114 French banks. SurePay verifies 99.5% of all online payments in the Netherlands with its IBAN-Name Check. SEPAmail.eu offers an IBAN verification service in France for more than 90% of all bank accounts used by companies. StreamMind provides the connection between these two networks.
This allows banks, consumers and companies in France and the Netherlands to check the accuracy of the account holder. This significantly reduces fraud and errors in payments. In addition, the IBAN-Name Check increases efficiency and improves the customer journey.
Since 2017, the IBAN-Name Check has been built into Online Banking of the Dutch banks, which checks the name of the account holder when making a payment. This prevents errors and fraud. Every day, a warning is issued 100,000 times that the name and account holder are not the same. This gives consumers and businesses greater certainty that their payments go to the intended account holder.
When it was introduced in 2017, Rabobank and later the other Dutch banks were the first in the world to protect their customers with this service. Rabobank will also be the first Dutch bank to offer this cross border IBAN-Name Check to their customers.
The IBAN-Name Check is also used by companies like insurance companies, lenders, government agencies, energy companies and many others, to prevent fraud or when accepting new suppliers, customers and employees.
Across Europe, payments have increasingly shifted to digital channels. This has led to a sharp increase in fraud through methods such as phishing, spoofing, APP fraud, invoice fraud and CEO fraud. In addition, fraud is becoming increasingly international, with fraudsters using foreign bank accounts for fraudulent purposes.
David-Jan Janse, CEO and CO-Founder of SurePay, said: “Since implementing our IBAN-Name Check for banks and corporates in the Netherlands in 2017, our customers have witnessed an 81% drop in reported scams and a 67% drop in misdirected payments. The natural next step was to make our solution available for cross-border payments and we are very proud of our partnership with SEPAmail and StreamMind which allows us to achieve that goal.”
Jacques Vanhautère, CEO of SEPAmail.eu, said: “2021 is clearly the year of take-off of DIAMOND, our French IBAN check solution with more than 30% gross. With this partnership with SurePay and thanks to the help of StreamMind we enter now in another dimension that is the European area to offer a real international solution to fight against IBAN fraud. This connection between France and the Netherlands is a first great step to a cross Europe IBAN reliability solution for both French and Netherlands communities.
Nicolas Muhadri, CEO of StreamMind, said: “Our goal is to secure exchanges and transactions between organisations and humans. We believe this partnership is a step forward in international development to fight payment fraud. StreamMind is honored to be part of this partnership and to have developed software that is cross-country compatible to make this project come true. We know this is only the beginning; we are discussing with most European countries to connect them before the end of 2022, knowing that client’s requests have already tripled between 2020 and 2021.„
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
