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), companies are showing strong interest in this offer, especially with the gradual adoption of the company.
However, some banks have not anticipated the enthusiasm of businesses for this service; they must therefore quickly review their IT infrastructures to be able to process the verification of payment campaigns containing several hundred or thousands of transactions in a burst.
Companies should therefore not be too concerned if their bank account manager tells them that the availability of this service has been postponed for a few months.
You should take advantage of this time to prepare well by checking your bank details in your third-party databases as soon as possible.
The process
As part of the VoP offer, the company sends a payment file to its bank, asking it to first verify the beneficiaries' bank details.
These beneficiaries can be natural persons (the checks will then be carried out on the account wording) or legal entities (the checks will then be carried out on the SIREN, the intra-community VAT number or the LEI code).
Within 5 seconds, the bank must then return one of the 4 responses below that NEOFI uses to help the company automate processing:
• Match: everything is fine
• Close match: one (or two) letter(s) differ(s) (this type of return is impossible in the event of a check on a legal entity)
• No match: the contact details do not match
• Un-match: there was a technical problem
These bank returns are sent in an XML pain.002 format called VSR: VoP Status Report.
Drawing on its expertise in reading these XML formats, NEOFI has created the NEOFI Compliance which uses the following functionalities to automate the process:
• Sending a readable and usable email containing the details of unmatched transactions
• Displaying unusable transactions (no match and un-match) for information, and rectifiable transactions (close match) for action: do we correct? do we send? do we delete?
• Re-batching of “match” transactions (by adding those that we may have decided to correct) for sending for validation / signature.
• Alternatively, to save time, we can configure NEOFI so that all “match” transactions are automatically returned to the bank for immediate processing.
