The European Payments Council's Verification of Payee scheme has completed its first six months of mandatory operation, reaching more than 2,700 participating payment service providers since the EU Instant Payments Regulation required all eurozone PSPs to verify recipient names before executing credit transfers from October 9, 2025.
The VoP service requires a payer's payment service provider to send the intended beneficiary's name and IBAN to the beneficiary's PSP, which checks its customer records and returns one of four responses: match, close match, no match, or unable to verify. The entire verification must complete within one second under normal conditions, with a maximum of three seconds. The payer then sees the result and decides whether to proceed with the payment.
Behind the consumer-facing simplicity lies an infrastructure of 55 registered Routing and Verification Mechanisms that connect PSPs across SEPA's 36 countries. These RVMs serve as the lookup layer, routing verification requests to the correct beneficiary PSP regardless of which clearing and settlement mechanism processes the underlying payment. The EPC designed this federated architecture to work across TIPS, RT1, and STEP2-T without requiring a centralized database of account holders.
On March 16, 2026, the EPC published version 1.1 of the VoP Scheme Rulebook, scheduled to take effect on September 20, 2026. The update addresses issues and inconsistencies identified during the first months of live operation. Rulebook version updates of this kind typically refine message handling for edge cases, clarify participant obligations, and standardize error responses that proved ambiguous in production environments.
EBA Clearing has emerged as a major infrastructure provider through its Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection service. More than 55 RT1 and STEP2 participants across 14 European countries have adopted or are preparing to adopt FPAD's VoP solution, representing over 40 percent of traffic flowing through EBA Clearing's instant and batch payment systems. FPAD goes beyond basic name matching by applying fraud detection intelligence to the verification process, flagging transactions that match known fraud patterns even when the name verification itself returns a match.
The scheme's deployment has surfaced a practical challenge that will intensify as participation grows. PSPs in different countries maintain customer records with varying levels of standardization. A name stored with diacritics and local character conventions in one bank's records might be submitted without them by a payer in another country, requiring fuzzy matching algorithms that balance fraud prevention against false rejections. The close match response category was designed for these cases, but the thresholds for what constitutes a close match versus a no match can vary between implementations.
The non-eurozone EEA deadline of July 9, 2027 will bring a second wave of PSPs into the VoP scheme, extending coverage to countries including Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The EPC expects VoP participation to exceed 3,000 PSPs by that date, creating a verification network that covers virtually every bank account in the Single Euro Payments Area.
The first standardized reporting under the IPR, due April 9, 2026, will provide baseline fraud data covering the period from October 2022 through December 2025. Subsequent annual reports will capture post-mandate fraud trends, providing the first quantitative evidence of VoP's impact on misdirected payments and authorized push payment fraud across the eurozone.