What’s next for Verification of Payee?

• As VOP implementation across the SEPA region progresses, what are the practical next steps for financial institutions?
• As financial institutions prepare for the October 2025 deadline, what are the most common implementation challenges? Are interpretations of the VOP rulebook aligned across regions, or is fragmentation still an issue?
• Could VoP become the global standard for payee verification, similar to how GDPR reshaped data privacy? How are regions outside SEPA preparing, and will Europe’s lead drive global convergence—or divergence?
• Is the industry ready to look beyond the compliance aspects of VOP and focus on the benefits in terms of fraud prevention, user experience, and risk management?

 

Verification of Payee (VOP) scheme rules have been released by the European Payment Council (EPC) to comply with the EU’s Instant Payments Regulation (IPR). VOP will become a requirement across the SEPA region on 9 October 2025. Designed as a layer of fraud mitigation, VOP will increase levels of confidence in payments, reduce authorised push payment (APP) fraud, and decrease the amount of manual intervention needed in an environment with rapidly growing instant payments.

Challenges emerge as each PSP across the Eurozone must establish its own VOP service or select a service provider known as a routing and verification mechanism (RVM ) in order to comply with the scheme rulebook. As implementation progresses, financial institutions are grappling with data security, core banking change, and ensuring all-channel implementation of VOP. However, it is not only the technical implementation challenges that institutions are facing. Several aspects are still lacking consensus across the industry, including liability, bulk validation or the verification of virtual accounts.

Considering all of this, what are the practical next steps for financial services organisations as we’re approaching the VOP deadline in the EU? And how are we going to see Corporates integrating VOP in their finance workflows?

However, the need for Payee Verification, aka KYP (Know Your Payee), goes beyond Europe. Will VOP have a GDPR moment and propel forward verification mechanisms globally? What will the future look like? Which countries still have gaps in KYP? What will KYP look like in three to five years, as payee verification systems must constantly evolve to respond to fraudsters adapting their modus operandi?

Register for this Finextra webinar, hosted in association with iPiD, to join our panel of industry experts who will discuss what still needs to be clarified before the VOP deadline, the challenges and next steps of the implementation, and the ripple effects the VOP scheme might have globally.