SEPA payment transactions

, The VoP scheme: Enhancing payment security across the SEPA area

The VoP scheme is an additional service provided for SEPA Credit Transfers and SEPA Instant Credit Transfers within the EU/EEA before the transaction is executed. A combination of payee name and IBAN is compared with the data stored at the recipient bank. The result documents the extent to which the verification has yielded a match:

The VoP result tells you if the payee’s IBAN details match the recipient bank’s records. The aim of this statutory requirement is to reduce misrouting of credit transfers. You can decide whether you would like the entire file to be executed or not – irrespective of the result.

If you are a corporate client or a small business customer – i.e. not a private consumer – and you submit credit transfers in batch files (e.g. via the EBICS procedure), you can choose whether to carry out Verification of Payee (= opt-in) or not (= opt-out), provided that the batch file contains more than one credit transfer/transaction. If you decide to opt out, your credit transfer process will not change.

If you order payments with payment files containing only one credit transfer or if you purposely choose the VoP service (opt-in), every payment in a file you have submitted will first be matched via the VoP service. You will receive the results of the VoP service in a structured format (pain.002). The file then has to be signed again, using the Electronic Distributed Signature (EDS), if you wish it to be executed.

Corporate clients and small business customers in particular will feel the impact from the requirements stipulated in the new EU Regulation on their usual processes when submitting payment orders via EBICS, FinTS/HBCI and service data centres. The “Information” section in the “Instructions on how to navigate the changes to payment transactions” document contains details along with several auditing recommendations and other practical recommendations to ensure that the process of settling your payment transactions remains smooth at all times.

We recommend that you communicate the correct payee data to your payers in good time before receiving a payment. Please refer to the “Information” section in the “Practical recommendations for payment receipts” document for more details.