A month before the 9 October 2025 deadline, Verification of Payee testing across the euro area is exposing predictable but instructive gaps: name-matching algorithms that stumble on diacritics and transliteration, corporate accounts whose registered names differ from their trading names, and edge cases where a "close match" answer must be worded precisely enough to help the payer without libelling the payee.
Matching names is genuinely hard
Anyone who has built screening systems could have warned the industry: comparing names across languages, scripts and formatting conventions is a discipline, not a string comparison. "Müller GmbH", "MUELLER GMBH" and "Muller Ltd." may be one company or three. The banks solving VoP well are borrowing techniques from sanctions screening: normalisation, transliteration awareness, and scoring rather than binary answers.
The same discipline, one layer up
WeVerify applies that discipline one layer above payments: transliteration-aware screening across Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts against global sanctions and PEP data, and company verification that resolves trading names to registered entities and their beneficial owners. When the counterparty is verified before the contract, the payment check becomes confirmation rather than discovery.