Verification of Payee (VoP)

VoP closes the gap that made misdirected and APP-style fraud on SEPA credit transfers cheap to execute: before VoP, a SEPA payment was routed on the IBAN alone, and the payee name the payer typed was never checked against the account. Under Regulation (EU) 2024/886 (the Instant Payments Regulation), every euro-area PSP must now run the name check on both instant and standard SEPA credit transfers — at no charge to the payer — before execution.

The Four Result Categories

The EPC scheme (rulebook EPC218-23) defines exactly four machine-readable outcomes:

• Match (MTCH) — the name matches the account holder. Proceed.
• Close Match (CMTC) — a near match; the responding PSP returns the actual registered name so the payer can judge whether the difference is a typo or a wrong account.
• No Match (NMTC) — the name does not match. The payer is warned but can still proceed.
• Verification Not Possible (NOAP) — the check could not be performed (account closed, PSP unreachable, service down). The scheme provides no reason code beyond this single value.

There is no standardised EU reason-code set behind a failed check — any granularity beyond the four codes is provider-proprietary. For the full code tables, the UK comparison, and per-code operator handling, see the Verification of Payee and Confirmation of Payee match-code reference.

What It Means for Operators

Advisory, not blocking. A No Match does not stop the transfer. The payer can override; the scheme’s job is the warning, not the block. Operators should surface the returned name on a Close Match rather than treating it as a pass.

Liability turns on the warning. If the payer’s PSP properly delivered the discrepancy warning and the payer proceeded anyway, the payer generally bears the fraud loss. If the PSP failed to deliver the warning, the PSP refunds.

Payout names now matter. For platforms sending SEPA payouts, beneficiary-name data quality became an operational variable in October 2025: stale or abbreviated legal names trigger Close Match and No Match results at scale, adding friction and support load to flows that previously cleared silently.

VoP is the EU counterpart to the UK’s Confirmation of Payee — the same concept, but a separate scheme with a deliberately leaner result model.