Clear Junction Launches Confirmation of Payee Service

Earlier this year, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) published a new rule that encouraged banks and building societies to adopt Confirmation of Payee in a bid to reduce the number of individuals and businesses who fall victim to authorised push payment scams. Clear Junction is therefore delighted to launch its Confirmation of Payee service and boost the security of payments.

According to the latest report from UK Finance, more than £609.8 million was stolen by criminals through authorised and unauthorised fraud in the first half of 2022. While this was a 13 per cent reduction from the same period in the previous year, it is clear that more needs to be done to reduce incidents of fraud. Of this total, some £249.1 million was lost through authorised push payment scams. Clearly, this is a significant issue and one that needs to be combatted sooner rather than later.

It is with these figures in mind, that PSR published a new rule that paved the way for more banks and building societies to adopt Confirmation of Payee (CoP), which is a means for financial institutions to check and confirm that the account that is sending and/or receiving funds is the correct one.

LAUNCH OF CONFIRMATION OF PAYEE

Given all of the above, Clear Junction is delighted to announce that it has recently introduced a new CoP service for clients receiving GBP payments in the UK. In recent months, there has been an industry wide effort to reduce the number of individuals and businesses who fall victim to the aforementioned APP scams, and make the world of payments a safer place.

Put simply, CoP is a means of checking the name of the account to which payments are being made prior to execution, thereby reducing particular types of fraud, as well as misdirected payments that occur through user error. Prior to the development and implementation of the service, a payer would give the payment service provider the payee’s details, such as the bank sort code and account number, as well as the name of the person or organisation that the funds were being sent to.

The institution facilitating the payment would then check the sort code and the account number and, if everything was deemed to be correct, the funds would be sent. However, this fell short of the security and checks required, as there was no means for the person sending the funds to check the name of the account against these details. However, with the introduction of CoP, everything can now be cross-checked – and if anything does not match up, then the payment will not go through. This essentially makes it virtually impossible for APP scams to work.