On 9 October 2025 the EU Instant Payments Regulation switches on Verification of Payee across the euro area: before a credit transfer executes, the payer's bank must check whether the beneficiary name matches the IBAN and warn of mismatches. It is the largest anti-fraud infrastructure change European payments have seen in a decade, aimed squarely at invoice fraud and authorised push payment scams.
The principle behind the plumbing
Strip away the ISO messages and VoP encodes a simple principle: credentials are not counterparties. An IBAN is a routing instruction; it says nothing about who stands behind the account. Payment fraud thrived in that gap for decades, and the same gap exists wherever businesses accept a name typed into a form as an identity.
Generalise it: verify who, not just what
The identity equivalent of VoP is verifying the person and their authority, not just their asserted details. WeVerify runs that check end to end: chip-level identity, company existence and UBO, and crucially whether this verified person is authorised to act for that verified company, before a contract is signed or an account changed. Banks are being forced to close the counterparty gap in payments; the businesses that close it in onboarding and contracting will simply be ahead of their own fraud curve.