European Payments Council updates name-matching guidance for Verification of Payee to version 2.0

The European Payments Council has published version 2.0 of its recommendations on how payment service providers should match names under the Verification of Payee (VOP) scheme, The Paypers reported on 3 November 2026. The update follows the 2026 change cycle for the VOP rulebook and a public consultation, and sits alongside version 1.1 of the scheme rulebook, which took effect on 20 September 2026. Verification of Payee lets a person or business paying by SEPA credit transfer check that the name they enter matches the account holder before the money is sent. The responding bank, which holds the payee's account, returns one of three results: Match, Close Match or No Match. The new guidance covers how to handle spelling differences, swapped letters, initials, phonetic variations, commercial names and commonly used abbreviations, for both people and companies. The recommendations also set a default for character sets: messages between payment providers should, as a rule, use a limited Latin character set carried in UTF-8, although parties can agree other arrangements by contract. The EPC stresses that each responding bank stays responsible for the result it returns and may apply its own matching criteria, so outcomes can still differ between banks. No separate effective date for version 2.0 was given in the report. This matters to online merchants because many collect money by bank transfer or pay-by-bank in the euro area, and customers see the VOP result before paying. A business whose trading name differs from its legal account name risks showing a Close Match or No Match warning, which can make shoppers abandon a payment or contact support.