Bottomline to combat payment fraud with the launch of Confirmation of Payee

By Megha Bhattacharya

UK-based FinTech Bottomline today announced the launch of the cloud-based Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service for UK banks.

Confirmation of Payee helps eligible banks and building societies to give their payers better assurance for their payments and avoid fraudulent misdirection of payments. Any new beneficiary, the technology offers a real-time account name check against the payee account. CoP also supports payments made by Faster Payment, CHAPS, and Bacs-originated credits.

“Authorised Push Payment fraud is the fastest category of fraud in our industry with £456m losses last year,” said Ed Adshead-Grant, General Manager and Director of Payments at Bottomline Technologies. “With this new SaaS-based service, we can have any eligible bank or building society quickly up and running with CoP on their accounts to ensure they remain competitive in the role of trusted guardian as well as reducing the risk of fraudulent APP activity.”

CoP, the new overlay service, was mandated by the UK’s Payment Systems Regulator in 2020 for the six largest banking groups in the UK. Other eligible banks or building societies can apply to Pay.UK for considering the launch of Confirmation of Payee service.

Brian Cunnington, CoP Product SME at Pay.UK commented, “We are delighted to see Confirmation of Payee now making a difference in the UK payments environment. The new service offers protection for consumers through the account name checking service, reducing errors and fraudulent misdirection of funds.”

Recently, Bottomline announced the launch of Pay Direct. The company stated that the new Open Banking payment initiation service is expected to offer companies a better way to receive online payment from customers.