Confirmation of Payee (CoP) is a UK account-name-checking service, operated through Pay.UK, that verifies whether the name a payer enters matches the name on the destination account before an account-to-account payment is sent. It is a fraud- and misdirection-prevention layer with a defined API contract (match, close match, no match) that has become mandatory for UK payment service providers, and it has a direct EU analog — Verification of Payee — under the Instant Payments Regulation.
Confirmation of Payee
Confirmation of Payee is the check that answers ‘am I actually paying who I think I’m paying?’ before an account-to-account payment leaves. The payer enters a name; CoP verifies it against the destination account and returns a match, a close match (with the real name), or no match — closing the gap that authorized-push-payment fraud and simple typos exploit.
- A defined verification contract - Match / close-match / no-match is a small, machine-legible API surface other payment flows can call before they execute.
- Mandatory in the UK - Operated through Pay.UK and required of UK payment service providers, it is now table stakes for account-to-account payments.
- An EU analog is coming - Verification of Payee under the Instant Payments Regulation extends the same idea across the euro area.
In my UK payments scoring, CoP shows up as a distinct verification resource at the rails and open-banking players (Form3, Volt, Modulr) — a good example of the write-adjacent primitives that make account-to-account payments safe enough to compete with cards. For an agent initiating a payment on someone’s behalf, a machine-checkable payee verification is exactly the guardrail that should sit in front of the action, and the UK is the market that standardized it.
