We are proposing to give a specific direction requiring approximately 400 payment service providers (PSPs) to implement a system to offer Confirmation of Payee (CoP) to their customers (both as payers and payees).
This is a continuation of the journey we started when we issued Specific Direction 10 (SD10) in August 2019 to the six largest banking groups, requiring them to send and respond to CoP requests. It represents our ambition to see the widespread adoption of CoP by more PSPs and a greater number of payment system users benefitting from the protection of CoP.
CoP was designed to help stop some types of authorised push payment (APP) fraud and accidentally misdirected payments by checking whether the name of a payee’s account matches the name and account details provided by a payer.
At the time of issuing SD10, the directed banks covered around 90% of transactions made via Faster Payments and CHAPS. Our rationale at that time for not going further and directing more PSPs was to ensure CoP was established quickly. Since then, a number of non-directed PSPs have voluntarily joined the service, so that there are now a total of 33 PSPs offering the CoP service.
We are keen to see more firms providing Confirmation of Payee (CoP) protection and want to take further action to achieve that. This consultation outlines our plans to direct around 400 more financial firms to introduce the added security measure.
This will happen in two groups.
- The first group will be prioritised based on the complexity and size of the institution and/or firms where the adoption of CoP could have the biggest impact in preventing APP scams. This first group would see an increase of CoP coverage from 92% of transactions made via Faster Payments to 99%. This group would need to have implemented CoP by 30 June 2023.
- The second group includes all other firms which use either unique sort codes, or that are building societies using a Secondary Reference Data (SRD) reference type. This group would need to have implemented CoP by 30 June 2024.
If you would like to share your views on this consultation, please send these to us by 5pm on 8 July 2022.
You can email your comments to cop.consultation@psr.org.uk or write to us at:
Confirmation of Payee Consultation
Payment Systems Regulator
12 Endeavour Square
London
E20 1JN