About the VOP Scheme

The Verification of Payee (VOP) scheme, developed and managed by the European Payments Council (EPC), establishes a standardised framework for verifying the identity of payee across the European Union. This initiative aims to enhance payment security and reduce misdirected payments by ensuring that the name or ID provided by a payer matches the account holder's name associated with a given IBAN before a credit transfer is executed.

PSPs within the Eurozone must support VOP for credit transfer transactions by 9 October 2025, 18 months from the IPR’s entry into force. Non-Eurozone based PSPs are mandated to implement this by July 2027.

For more detailed information, you can refer to the EPC's official VOP Scheme page.

VOP Service+ Overview

Banfico VOP Service+ is a unified service management and validation platform that enables Payment Service Providers (PSPs) to align with the EPC VOP Scheme and EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR). It combines robust service management capabilities with technical conformance validation to help PSPs implement, operate, and oversee VOP services.

The platform supports both Requestor and Responder roles and ensures that the VOP service implementation is reliable, secure, and compliant with regulations. Key platform features include:

Service Management

Service Management in VOP Service+ helps you operate reliable VOP services with 24x7 visibility, issue resolution tools, and transparent communication.

• Service Desk – Raise, manage, and resolve issues and support tickets efficiently between scheme participants. Given that there are 3500+ VOP scheme participants, it is a tedious process to seek and receive support for service tickets. VOP Service+ helps streamline the communication process with direct integration with the EDS directory for the contact information and its messaging capabilities.

• Service Notification – Share timely updates about outages, maintenance, or service changes with other scheme participants of the EPC VOP scheme.

• Service Monitoring – Monitor API availability, TLS/eIDAS certificate validity, and endpoint responsiveness in real time.

Conformance Validation

It helps you ensure your VOP implementation meets the EPC standards across behaviour, logic, performance, and security.

• Functional Conformance – Validate your Requestor and Responder flows against the EPC VOP Rulebook, and API & Security framework specifications.

• Name Matching Evaluation – Evaluates the name matching capabilities of the VOP service against EPC VOP name matching guidelines and commonly accepted name matching practices like data cleansing, business descriptors, phonetics-based name matching, Levenshtein Distance based matching etc.

• Performance Testing – Evaluates your system’s ability to handle high volumes of requests through simulated traffic and stress scenarios.

• API Security Testing – Evaluates vulnerabilities in your implementation using security scans aligned with EPC’s security framework.