Every payment, whether domestic or cross-border, relies on one simple assumption: that the money will reach the right payee. But fraud, misdirected transfers, and scams continue to erode this trust.
That’s why regulators and central banks worldwide have introduced pre-transaction payee verification schemes from the UK and Australia’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP) and Europe’s Verification of Payee (VoP) to similar mechanisms in Brazil, South Africa, India, Japan, Nigeria, Thailand or Malaysia. These initiatives represent a critical first step in creating safer payments. Yet they only solve half the problem.
Criminals don’t respect borders, and the gaps in cross-border flows remain wide open. That’s where Know Your Payee (KYP) comes in to extend the same protection globally.
Squeezing The Balloon: Scams Go Offshore
Criminals don’t stop at borders. Once local defences get stronger, they simply shift tactics to weaker jurisdictions. Evidence is everywhere:
UK: Fraud Shifts from Domestic to Cross-Border
UK Finance reported that while domestic Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud fell by 20%, thanks in part to new mandatory reimbursement rules, international losses nearly doubled, reaching 11% of total APP fraud in 2024. Criminals are exploiting cross-border rails not yet covered by protections and formal validation services, a clear gap where pre-payout verification is missing. We know also that its very challenging for recovery of funds in a different jurisdiction.
Europe: Cross-Border Transactions Are the Weak Link
The rapid rise of real-time payments across Europe has exposed further vulnerabilities where real-time payee verification and name check APIs are absent.
The European Banking Authority’s 2024 report highlights European citizens being defrauded through authorised push payment fraud, with money often lost to countries outside Europe that have weaker regulatory controls, making recovery difficult. A significant share of APP fraud proceeds leaves the European Economic Area (EEA) and are rarely recovered. In fact, for credit transfers the report identifies that 43% of the fraudulent value and 36% of fraudulent transactions are linked to cross-border activity. Given Europe is tightening its intra-Europe protections with VoP the potential for this to increase is vast.
Fraudsters are borderless. Payment protection still isn’t.
Australia: Offshore Operators Exploit Domestic Victims
In Australia, rising off-shore fraud follows global patterns, with notable cases exposing significant vulnerabilities. For example, the infamous Bangkok “boiler room” scam lured thousands of Australians into wiring millions abroad for fake bond investments. In another case, fraudsters intercepted solicitor emails in a property transaction, nearly costing a couple A$800,000, as the diverted funds ended up overseas. Similarly, a nurse was manipulated by scammers posing as Chinese police through live video extortion, resulting in a transfer of over A$320,000 to foreign accounts.
This is what the gap looks like in practice: when a customer tries to pay abroad, banks often display a warning that they cannot confirm if the name matches the account number.
Swap the Endpoint and Go Global by Re-Using Your Investments
Here’s the good news: banks and PSPs don’t need to rebuild from scratch.
The channels are already primed for pre-transaction KYP checks thanks to VoP and CoP projects. Extending the same user experience and verification logic to cross-border fraud prevention requires minimal additional investment.
Think of it as simply swapping the endpoint: the same compliance spend that secured domestic rails can now protect international ones with a single Payee Verification API, iPiD Validate.
Banks in many countries are already positioned to enhance their domestic verification with Global KYP. Indeed, in most countries having an instant payment system, payers are already used to see a name-display or name-check exposed as they create a new domestic transaction.
Why Banks and PSPs Should Care
Stopping at local verification is only half the job; going global completes the picture. Extending Global Payee Verification beyond domestic rails not only reduces fraud losses but also helps reduce payment reversals overseas, cutting down on costly investigations and disputes. It strengthens the payment reconciliation process globally, streamlining operations by reducing manual reviews and callbacks. At the same time, it tackles real-time payment fraud globally by catching scams before money ever leaves the country.
By addressing these pain points, banks and PSPs lower support costs, protect reputations that span across markets, and strengthen customer confidence with faster, safer cross-border payouts. In short, Global KYP turns compliance spend into enterprise leverage.
The Case for Global KYP
The path forward is simple. Banks and PSPs can reuse their VoP/CoP front-end that customers are already familiar with, extend the same verification logic to cross-border flows where fraud is leaking, and standardize their approach to build a single Global Payee Verification layer across all payment rails.
At iPiD we’ve built the world’s largest global Know Your Payee (KYP) platform allowing real-time account validation and name-checking against billions of accounts in scores of countries around the world. And it’s all powered by a single API doing the hard work of standardising validation and match responses.
References
- UK Finance – Fraud continues to pose a major threat with over £1 billion stolen in 2024.
- The Payments Association – The impact of APP fraud on cross-border payments (Sept 2024).
- Banking Risk & Regulation – Majority of EU card payment fraud occurs through cross-border payments (2024).
- European Commission – VAT fraud: estimates of losses in the EU (2023).
- AP News – Australian police: 13 foreigners arrested in Thailand over investment scam (June 2025).
- News.com.au – Australians lose $162 million to payment redirection scams (2024).
- SBS News – Fake invoice scams costing Australians millions (2024).
- ACCC – Targeting Scams Report (2023).
- News.com.au – Aussie nurse loses $320,000 to chilling threat and extortion scam (2024).
