Our Confirmation of Payee service is an industry-wide initiative that looks to safeguard against misdirected payments and combat fraud. In our capacity as the UK’s payment systems operator, we have collaborated extensively with the industry in recent years to take Confirmation of Payee from a blueprint in 2018 to a service that is today used by over 320 organisations and performs more than 2.1 million checks a day.
But what is the future of Confirmation of Payee? And how can we use the learnings from the implementation of the service in the UK to help inform similar initiatives around the world? Here we discuss our plans for the continued development of the service, in both domestic and international contexts, to further increase security and user confidence in payments.
Confirmation of Payee: in the UK
The Payment Systems Regulator’s 2022 industry-wide mandate for payment service providers in the UK to implement Confirmation of Payee by October 2024 was clear testament to the recognised value of the service and its effectiveness in preventing misdirected payments and mitigating fraud. Leveraging our unique role at the centre of the payments ecosystem, we were able to bring together key entities across the industry to successfully expand the service to over 99% of organisations initiating Faster Payments in the UK.
Following conclusion of the expansion project, attention soon turned to how we could progress the service even further. We are now conducting a review into the service to ensure it continues to most effectively address the end-user detriments it was initially designed to.
We are also exploring other use cases of the service and whether there are other organisations, further to payment service providers, that could benefit from employing Confirmation of Payee such as Bacs Approved Bureau and BACS Approved Software Solution providers.
We are also looking at how we can implement other fraud prevention and detection tools that can check additional data points that can support payment service providers in identifying potential fraudulent accounts prior to a payment being processed.
Confirmation of Payee: international
Owed to the measurable impact and success of the service in the UK, Confirmation of Payee quickly gained repute in the international payments landscape and was held as a ‘poster child’ in initiatives of its kind.
We have since seen countries across the world work to develop similar initiatives and we have been actively engaging with our international counterparts, including Australian Payments Plus and GetVerified (New Zealand’s provider of Confirmation of Payee services), to share insights and learnings from our own journey that may help inform their own services.
Australian Payments Plus is going live with its own version of Confirmation of Payee in June 2025, meanwhile a similar initiative, Verification of Payee, is set to launch across Europe by October 2025. It demonstrates not only the shared understanding of the critical need for enhanced payment security across the world, but also Confirmation of Payee’s influence in creating effective solutions.
We will continue to monitor the development of these initiatives around the world and, in parallel, explore how we can refine our own model to ensure interoperability for cross-border payments.
Anu Raman, Confirmation of Payee Product Owner, said: “It’s heartening to see the successful adoption and growth of Confirmation of Payee in UK over the last 5 years and it’s important we continue to keep up with the payment’s industry demands. We have seen and heard from the industry the need to expand Confirmation of Payee availability for both domestic and international use cases. Our development agenda over the next two years will address these demands and enhance the product to reach many more organisations to provide protection and greater assurance that payments are being sent to the intended recipient and address every end-user detriment.”
