Additional VOP Information for Businesses

To ensure your incoming payments are verified successfully:

• Make sure your registered business name is correctly recorded with your bank or payment service provider.
• Use your registered business name (or an approved trading name) consistently on invoices, remittance details and correspondence.
• Where possible, avoid abbreviations or alternate spellings unless they are officially registered with your bank or payment service provider.

This helps your customers/payers pass the VOP check and reduces delays or unnecessary queries.

To ensure your outgoing payments are verified successfully:

• Use the full and correct name of the payee as registered with their bank or payment service provider. For individuals, include both first and last names. For companies, use the full legal or registered business name.
• Verify payee details via a verified source. Confirm names and IBANs directly with your suppliers, staff, or partners via a trusted channel.
• Regularly update your payee records in your accounting or payment systems to reflect name or account changes.
• Update your internal procedures to account for the new VOP service.
• Consider reaching out to creditors and employees to inform them about the new VOP service and to confirm with them that the account name held by you is accurate.

Being diligent with name accuracy and validation at setup stage can prevent payment delays, reduce fraud risk, and avoid follow-up with your payees.

SEPA Instant payments and VOP will be enabled automatically by your bank or payment service provider for individual payments. Please visit the website of your provider for more information on SEPA Instant payments and VOP, and for information on how VOP can work for bulk payment files.

If the VOP check returns a no match, close or partial match or match not possible result, your business should:

• Reconfirm the payee name directly with the recipient using a trusted channel.
• Consider delaying payment until the name is clarified.
• Avoid amending the name based solely on what the system returns, especially for invoice payments, unless verified.
• Confirm that the account intended to receive the payment is open and is a payment account.
• If there was a technical issue at the recipient’s bank or payment service provider, you could wait and retry later.

Businesses may find it beneficial to utilise the VOP feature to improve or update their internal processes, for example:

• Build VOP results into your payment approval workflow (e.g. flag no match payments for review).
• Set policies where payments with mismatches require dual approval or verification.

If a payer enters a name that is a close or a partial match, your registered name will be provided to allow them to input the correct name and avoid issues with subsequent payments. Your name will not be provided if there is a match, a no match or if a VOP was not possible.

Banks and payment service providers will typically match payee names to either:

• The registered legal name, or
• An officially recorded trading name (if listed on the receiving bank’s systems).
  Ensure that your trading name is registered and visible to your bank or payment service provider to avoid unnecessary mismatches.

• Business customers who submit bulk payment files (such as payroll or supplier payments) may be able to opt out of VOP checks.
• This opt-out is subject to your bank’s terms and conditions.
• We recommend speaking directly with your bank or payment service provider to understand the specific options and requirements available to your business.

This will depend on your bank or payment service provider and the size of the file.

Consult your bank or payment service provider to find out information on verification results.