Since 9 October 2025, every SEPA credit transfer sent from a euro-area bank goes through an extra step: Verification of Payee (VoP). Before you authorise the payment, your bank asks the payee's bank to confirm that the name you entered matches the holder of the IBAN.
For an individual sending the occasional transfer, this is almost invisible. For a business uploading monthly batches of dozens or hundreds of supplier or payroll payments, it is a different story. Here is what you need to know.
Where does this requirement come from?
VoP is mandated by Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on instant payments, which amends the SEPA Regulation. Its goal: fight IBAN-swap fraud (fake suppliers, fake bank details sent by email…) and data-entry mistakes.
- It applies to standard SEPA credit transfers (SCT) and instant transfers (SCT Inst).
- It does not apply to SEPA direct debits.
- It has been mandatory since 9 October 2025 for euro-area banks, and will be from 9 July 2027 for banks in EU countries outside the euro area.
- Your bank must provide the service free of charge.
The 4 possible outcomes
For each transfer, the payee's bank returns one of these results:
- Match: the name matches the account holder. Nothing to do.
- Close match: the name is almost identical (typo, abbreviation, missing legal form…). Your bank then shows you the account holder's actual name.
- No match: the name does not match the IBAN. This is the typical warning sign of fraud or an error.
- Verification not possible: the payee's bank could not answer (technical issue, specific account type…).
In every case, the final decision is yours: you can still go ahead with the transfer. But if you authorise it despite a warning and the funds reach the wrong person, your bank is not liable.
What about bulk payments (pain.001 XML files)?
This is the part businesses care about most. VoP also applies to bulk payment files, with one important exception: business customers submitting several payment orders as a single package can opt out of the verification.
- You keep VoP: after you upload your file, the bank checks every line and shows you a report (matches, close matches, no matches) before you sign the batch. You can then approve, correct or remove the suspicious lines.
- You opt out: your batches go through unchecked, as before. It is smoother, but you lose the anti-fraud protection and you bear the risk of a misdirected payment.
How the report is presented and how to opt out varies from bank to bank (online banking, EBICS, host-to-host contract…). Check with your bank before your next large batch.
Why your payee names now matter
Before VoP, the payee name in a payment file was almost decorative: only the IBAN was used to route the payment. Not anymore. A supplier file full of trading names, acronyms or first names only will trigger a flood of "close match" and "no match" results to review one by one.
The most common problem cases:
- Trading name instead of the registered company name: "Green Garden Services" when the account is held by "J. Smith Holdings Ltd".
- Employees recorded by first name only, or under a name that differs from the one on their account.
- Joint accounts or accounts held by a third party (spouse, parent company…).
- Truncated or misspelt names from old data entry.
5 steps to prepare your batches
- Clean up your payee file: for each supplier, use the exact name on their bank details, not their trading name.
- Ask for up-to-date bank details from payees that trigger warnings, through a trusted channel. Never change an IBAN based solely on an email announcing "new bank details".
- Check IBAN / BIC consistency before generating your file: an invalid IBAN will be rejected anyway.
- Test with a small batch to see your bank's VoP report before submitting your full payroll or supplier file.
- Make a deliberate decision about opting out: if you opt out to save time, make sure you have strong internal controls over IBAN changes.
How EasyBankFlow helps
EasyBankFlow takes the payee name exactly as it appears in your Excel or CSV file and puts it in the Nm field of the pain.001 XML. Note that the SEPA standard limits this field to 70 characters and only allows a restricted character set, so accented letters are converted (é → e, ç → c). Banks take these constraints into account, but keep full, exact names in your source file.
Before uploading your batch, you can also:
- check your IBANs and find the matching BICs with the IBAN → BIC tool;
- check your file's structure with the SEPA XML validator.
And if you pay beneficiaries outside the EEA, keep the other year-end deadline in mind: structured addresses become mandatory from 15 November 2026.
In short
Verification of Payee does not block your transfers, but it exposes every mismatch between a name and an IBAN. For businesses that pay in bulk, the smart move is to clean up the payee file now: with exact names, your batches go through without warnings and are approved in seconds.