As part of the VOP Roadshow in ECE, SurePay met yesterday with representatives of the Romanian banking and financial sector. Now that the company has been live with VOP across the entire Eurozone for more than six months, it was a good opportunity to reflect on the project and share some lessons learned.
Verification of Payee is a banking service that verifies whether the name of the beneficiary matches the IBAN provided by the payer before a payment is authorized. It is designed to combat Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud (where fraudsters trick victims into sending money) and to prevent accidental misdirection of funds due to typing errors.
The Verification Of Payee (VOP) scheme as defined by the European Payment Council (EPC) provides a set of inter-payment service provider (PSP) rules, practices and standards in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) to be complied with by participants who adhere to the scheme. See https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/other-schemes/verification-payee for more information about the scheme.
„At SurePay we consider account validation as our ‘bread and butter’. We have been offering this service in the whole of the Netherlands since 2017 and we are the largest vendor in the UK for Confirmation of Payee (CoP) since the scheme went live in 2019. Naturally, SurePay was well positioned for the broader European scope when the new regulation came out.” – the company said.
Scope
The driving legal force behind VOP is the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) (Regulation (EU) 2024/886). While the regulation focuses on accelerating the adoption of instant payments, it mandates VOP for allSEPA Credit Transfers.
This means that all PSPs offering Euro credit transfers must offer VOP to their customers.
There are approximately 3700 PSPs in Europe currently offering SEPA Credit Transfers. To ensure that all of these PSPs can technically check names with each other, the EPC created the VOP Scheme. The model is a decentralised one, similar to the model used in the UK with CoP. The scheme provides a Rulebook, a security framework, and a standardised API.
There are only 4 possible outcomes of a standard VOP request, namely: Match, Close-Match, No-Match, and NOAP. The latter is somewhat vaguely described as a valid reason code in case a match could not be performed for whatever reason.
„Implementation quality matters more than people expect. Basic VOP deployments across European markets product match rates around 44%. In our most mature markets, that figure is above 80%. The gap isn’t a technology problem. It’s data quality, matching logic, and the governance behind it.” – commented Ryan Hollebrandse, Market Development Manager, CEE at SurePay – Europe’s leading VOP provider.
The compliance deadline was 9 October 2025 for the Eurozone, and will be 9 July 2027 for the Non-Eurozone.
Hollebrandse added: „The compliance vs infrastructure question is a real one. Everyone knows 2027 is coming. The question (and decision to be made) is: do you build as a response to the SEPA mandate, or a foundation that protects customers across every payment flow?„
„Verification Of Payee is changing the way banks think about payment safety. What started as a compliance requirement is quickly becoming a strategic data layer for safer payments. The next phase is turning payment verification rails into a broader fraud intelligence ecosystem.” – stated Bridget (Britt) Meijer, Manager New Markets at SurePay.
Follow the link for the lessons learned by Surepay regarding the usage of BICs, QWAC certificates, the importance of diacritics, the usage of a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) for the Request-Id header field, timestamp, bulk checks for corporates and the maching rates.
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