Confirmation of Payee (CoP)

CoP was the first large-scale name-on-account check on a major push-payment rail, introduced by Pay.UK in 2020 as a response to authorised push payment (APP) fraud — scams where the victim willingly sends money to an account controlled by a fraudster. Because UK Faster Payments settle in seconds and are irrevocable, the name check before execution is the last structural control point.

Outcomes and Reason Codes

CoP returns the same broad outcomes as the EU’s scheme — Match, Close Match (with the actual registered name returned), No Match, and Unavailable — but unlike the EU model it adds around thirteen provider-documented reason codes beneath them: account does not exist (AC01), name mismatch (ANNM), customer opted out (OPTO), account switched under CASS, account-type mismatch, and others. That granularity lets operators distinguish a dead account from a typo from an opted-out payee, and route each case differently. The per-code handling is mapped in the Verification of Payee and Confirmation of Payee match-code reference.

Coverage and the APP-Fraud Link

Under the Payment Systems Regulator’s Specific Direction 17, CoP expanded from the original six banking groups to roughly 400 directed PSPs, reaching ~99% of Faster Payments and CHAPS transaction volume by October 2024. That coverage matters because of what arrived alongside it: from 7 October 2024, UK PSPs must reimburse in-scope APP scam victims up to £85,000, with liability split 50/50 between sending and receiving PSP.

CoP results feed directly into that liability framework. The check is advisory — a payer can proceed past a No Match — but a customer ignoring a clear No Match warning can factor into the consumer-standard-of-caution assessment, and a PSP that failed to present the warning properly weakens its own position.

What It Means for Operators

For operators paying out to UK accounts, the practical work is name-data hygiene: legal names that match account records, not trading names or abbreviations, or the payout flow accumulates Close Match friction. For operators collecting payments, CoP is handled by the payer’s bank — there is no merchant-side integration, but support teams should understand why customers see name-mismatch warnings.

CoP’s EU counterpart is Verification of Payee — the same concept, mandated across the euro area from October 2025, but with a four-code result model and no standardised reason codes.