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.
Industry: Payments
Related standards
Standards this one builds on, supersedes, profiles or is commonly deployed beside.
UK Open Banking Standard
CoP is part of the UK's payments assurance layer alongside Open Banking payment initiation.
Variable Recurring Payments
Payee verification underpins safe account-to-account payments, including VRP.
