Bank Account Holder Verification

As part of our compliance process, we perform bank account holder verification checks to reduce the risk of misdirected payments. These checks are mandatory and should be run for every outbound payment.

While the checks themselves cannot be skipped, you remain in control of whether an outbound payment proceeds. Payments with negative verification results can still be submitted, as long as you explicitly approve them (see the approval process for more details). Our role is to provide enough information for you to make an informed decision in these scenarios — whether to proceed or cancel.

This guide explains the different types of bank account holder verification and how to interpret the results.

Confirmation of Payee (CoP)

Confirmation of Payee (CoP) is the bank account holder verification check used for UK domestic payments. It helps confirm that the recipient’s name matches their bank account details, providing greater confidence that payments are sent to the intended recipient. For more information about the service, refer to Pay.UK.

How to understand the verification results

Once the verification checks are complete, the results are shown on the approval screen. If you are building your own integration, you can also access these results in the outbound payment response, under the verifications object. Within this object, the recipient_bank_account_holder_verification field indicates whether the recipient’s account holder name matches their bank account details. It returns one of the following values:

1. full_match - the account name exactly matches the details provided.

2. partial_match - the account name is similar but does not match to the details provided.

3. no_match - the provided name does not match the account details.

4. unable_to_match - the verification could not be performed due to recipient bank issues or technical issues.

If the result is a partial match, we will also provide the actual_account_name so you can decide if you need to correct the recipient's bank account details.

Performing verification checks before initiating a payment

If you want to retrieve bank account holder verification results before creating an outbound payment, you can run the verification check in advance. Running these preliminary checks can reduce the time required to initiate the payment.

Use Create a Bank Account Holder Verification to initiate the check, then poll for the result using Get a Bank Account Holder Verification.

Once the verification is complete, you can include it in the links object when creating an outbound payment.