A date, a postponement
The VoP (Verification of Payee) service is an offer that banks are required to provide from October 9, 2025, as stipulated in European Directive 2024/886 of March 13, 2024.
Originally designed to protect transfers between individuals (unitary by definition), businesses are showing strong interest in this offering, especially with the gradual adoption of instant payment.
However, some banks failed to anticipate the surge in demand for this service from businesses; they therefore need to quickly upgrade their IT infrastructure to handle the rapid processing of payment campaigns containing hundreds or thousands of transactions.
Businesses should not be overly concerned if their bank account manager informs them that the service's availability has been postponed by a few months.
This period should be used to prepare well by checking bank details in third-party databases as soon as possible.
The process
As part of the VoP offer, the company sends its bank a payment file, asking it to first verify the bank details of the beneficiaries.
These beneficiaries can be natural persons (the check will then be on the account description) or legal persons (the check will then be on the SIREN, the intra-community VAT number or the LEI code).
Within 5 seconds, the bank must then return one of the 4 answers below, which NEOFI uses to help the company automate processing:
• Match: everything is fine
• Close match: one (or two) letter(s) differ (this type of return is not possible when verifying a legal entity)
• No match: the contact details do not match
• Unmatch: there was a technical problem
These bank returns are sent in an XML format pain.002 called VSR: VoP Status Report.
Leveraging its expertise in reading these XML formats, NEOFI created the NEOFI Compliance , which uses the following functionalities to automate the process:
• Sending a readable and usable email containing details of unmatched transactions
. • Displaying unusable transactions (no match and unmatch) for information, and correctable transactions (close match) for action: correct? send? delete?
• Re-grouping of "match" transactions (adding those that have been corrected) for submission for validation/signature.
• Alternatively, to save time, NEOFI can be configured so that all "match" transactions are automatically sent back to the bank for immediate processing.
