SEPA Verification of Payee became mandatory in the euro area
Under the SEPA Verification of Payee scheme, euro-area payment service providers were required to offer a payee name-and-account check from 9 October 2025, giving payers a match result before an instant or standard credit transfer is sent.
ARCHIVED 01 MAR 2026 Now in force across the euro area and folded into standing SEPA scheme rules, so it no longer reads as a forthcoming change.
Verification of Payee (VoP) is a check that compares the payee name a payer enters against the name held for that account, returning a match, close-match or no-match result before the payment is sent. Its purpose is to cut misdirected payments and to make authorised push payment fraud harder, by giving the payer a clear warning when the name and the account number do not line up.
Under the European Payments Council scheme, euro-area payment service providers were required to offer VoP from 9 October 2025, ahead of the broader instant-payments obligations in the same programme. For payers, the visible change is a name-check step at the point of initiation; for providers, it meant building or sourcing the matching service, agreeing how close-match results are presented, and wiring the check into their payment channels without slowing the payment down.
Sources for this update1
- Scheme-specific ruleversion 1.1 (EPC218-23)
Verification Of Payee scheme rulebook ↗ — European Payments Council · Verification of Payee scheme rulebook: mandatory application date
The first rulebook version entered into force on 5 October 2025; version 1.1 was published in March 2026 to address issues found after deployment, and the EPC has announced a version 2.0 for later in 2026.