Confirmation of Payee: New Applications for Payment Verification

The Pay.UK Connection

The CoP service was introduced by Pay.UK, the organisation that runs the UK’s retail payment systems. Pay.UK is responsible for setting the rules and standards that define how banks, building societies and other Payment Service Providers (PSPs) must implement and operate the CoP service.

How CoP works

• CoP checks the name of the payer/payee against the account details provided before making a payment transaction
• When an individual or organisation wants to make a payment to a new payee or when setting up a Direct Debit, they must first verify new payees/payers which will be crossed referenced by their bank or payment service provider (PSP) to ensure the recipient's account name is the name registered to that account
• If the name is a match, the payment proceeds as usual. However, if there is a discrepancy or partial match, the payer is alerted to review the details and take appropriate action

How do businesses use CoP?

Bottomline’s solution is embedded at the point of capture, where customers are providing account details e.g. face-to-face, online, a mobile app, or through a call centre, where verification can be achieved through our simple API.

By verifying payee details at the point of engagement, this offers significant real-time benefits, including:

• Verifying payee details whenever they are added or amended
• Flagging where remediation is required
• Reducing the expense of repairing invalid data
• Blocking and preventing payment fraud

This stands out over other alternative solutions where verification checks are performed at the point payments are submitted for processing, or by using static file uploads to verify payees. Those measures increase the chance of costly remediation, a poor customer experience, and potential fraud.

“While the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) has already mandated that financial institutions incorporate CoP into their consumer banking services to help prevent APP fraud, we believe more can be done. Using our API first technology, companies of all sizes can now better safeguard their own business payments using CoP for Business.”

– Colin Swain, Bottomline’s Head of Product