Confirmation of Payee Schemes Compared: UK CoP, EU VoP, Australia CoP

Three major economies mandated payee name-checking domestically within five years of each other, and each built a different rulebook to do it. Rolling out to new markets, the difference is not academic. It decides whether the compliance build is a rules engine or a single API call.

UK Confirmation of Payee (CoP)

Pay.UK’s CoP has run since 2020 across Faster Payments and CHAPS, matching the name a payer enters against the name the receiving bank holds and returning match, close match or no match. It is the model most later schemes borrowed from, and it predates ISO 20022, layering onto existing Faster Payments messaging rather than a shared API standard.

EU Verification of Payee (VoP)

The EU set a harder deadline. Under the Instant Payments Regulation, euro-area PSPs had to offer VoP free of charge by 9 October 2025, with non-euro-area PSPs following by 9 July 2027. The European Payments Council’s VoP Scheme Rulebook, in force since 5 October 2025, standardises the API and match responses across roughly 3,000 banks and PSPs through a shared directory service, an approach built around ISO 20022 elements from the start.

Australia Confirmation of Payee (CoP)

Australia’s CoP rolled out through 2025 across the major banks, built on New Payments Platform infrastructure and matching BSB and account number against the registered name before a first-time or edited payee completes. Unlike the UK and EU schemes, it checks only new or changed payees rather than every transaction.

What the differences mean for a build

A bank operating across all three needs three separate integrations, three sets of match-response logic and three compliance timelines, unless the connectivity layer is shared. No country in Asia yet runs a standalone Confirmation of Payee scheme equivalent to the UK or EU model, but the building blocks are already live: the linked PromptPay in Thailand, PayNow in Singapore and DuitNow in Malaysia, display the registered account name before a transfer completes, and Brazil's PIX does the same, backed by its DICT registry. Lighter-weight name display today, formal match/no-match schemes with a rulebook tomorrow, is a plausible path, and it is one more reason a shared connectivity layer beats building against each scheme as it formalises.

iPiD connects to CoP, VoP and other local schemes through one integration point, so a bank does not rebuild the same logic for every jurisdiction. See how one connection covers UK CoP, EU VoP and beyond.