Concepts
Verification of Payee
Verification of Payee (VoP) is designed to help prevent fraud and misdirected payments by confirming that the intended recipient’s name matches the name registered on the account before a payment is made. VoP is required by the SEPA Instant Payment Regulation to enhance security in the payment ecosystem.
The VoP process typically involves the following steps:
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Before the payment is processed, the payer’s bank sends a verification request to the payee’s bank
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The payee’s bank checks if the provided name matches the name on the account
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The payee’s bank responds with a match status (match, close match, or no match)
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Based on the response, the payer can decide whether to proceed with the payment
This approach helps reduce the risk of payments being sent to incorrect or fraudulent accounts, providing an additional layer of security for financial transactions.
Verification of Payee Responder Service
A VoP Responder Service is an implementation that enables financial institutions to respond to VoP requests. It acts as the responder component in the VoP flow, receiving verification requests from a VoP Scheme, retrieving account details, performing matching, and sending back the match result.
Core Components
The VoP Responder Service relies on several external services to determine the verification outcome:
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Account Management - Provides account details, including the account names
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Name Matching - Determines the match status (match, no match, close match) based on configured scoring thresholds
Error Handling
The VoP Responder Service handles errors commonly, which follow the following pattern:
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Log error or warning message to logs utilising Context Propagation to match requests to log lines
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Output Message Logs for each call to an external service to track requests and responses
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Respond with a relevant HTTP status code and description indicating the reason for error