The European Payments Council published version 2.0 of its recommendations for name matching under the Verification of Payee (VOP) scheme on November 3, 2026, after the scheme’s 2026 change cycle and a public consultation that ran from April 1 to June 30. The guidance sets out how responding payment service providers can prepare and compare payee names to return a Match, Close Match or No Match, covering spelling errors, transposed letters, initials, phonetic variants, abbreviations and commercial names.
Why it matters: The EPC says the aim is fewer unnecessary Close Match and No Match results, which add friction before a credit transfer is sent. Each responding PSP stays responsible for the result and may apply its own criteria, and the document also tells PSPs and routing mechanisms how to convert names into the limited Latin character set that inter-PSP messages must generally use.
Source: European Payments Council, November 3, 2026; Finextra, November 4, 2026
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Image: Torsten Dettlaff, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
