AccessPay, the leading provider of bank integration, today announced the addition of Confirmation of Payee (CoP) and Sanctions Screening capabilities to its Fraud & Error Prevention Suite, launched in 2023. The new capabilities will enable finance teams to avoid fraudulent and non-authorized payments and accidental misdirection of funds. They will also ensure compliance in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.

“In developing the Fraud & Error Prevention Suite, AccessPay’s aim was to help businesses take a proactive approach to fraud and risk management,” states Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay. “Regulators have increasingly high expectations when it comes to fraud and risk management, as demonstrated by the upcoming UK SOx regulation2, which requires large businesses to have robust controls in place to prevent fraud and errors. The addition of new CoP and Sanctions Screening capabilities will allow finance teams to de-risk even more elements of the payments lifecycle within our platform, demonstrating these controls to regulators.”

The new CoP capability from AccessPay enables organizations to perform name checks against beneficiaries to ensure the payment is sent to the correct account, helping to protect against Authorised Push Payment Fraud and the risk of human error. The UK’s largest banks currently offer coP checks and the PSR3 has mandated that all PSPs4 and building societies roll out these checks by mid-2024.

“Many finance professionals will be familiar with CoP checks through their banking platforms; a key differentiator of AccessPay’s CoP service is that it is embedded within the AccessPay platform,” details Fiona Brown, Customer Success Director at AccessPay. “This removes the need for finance teams to conduct checks off-platform by creating mock payments on banking portals to verify payee details. Instead, all checks happen within AccessPay, considerably decreasing the risks associated with manual checks and increasing efficiency in payment workflows.”

AccessPay’s new Sanctions Screening capability enables businesses to check individuals, companies and transactions against government-issued lists of restricted parties. This helps firms subject to Money Laundering regulations bolster their AML5 processes when onboarding customers by detecting accounts linked to financial crime. Keeping up with the increasingly complex sanctions landscape has proved particularly challenging in light of the enduring Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has seen bodies such as OFSI6 introduce a raft of new sanctions packages against Russia and its allies. Failure to comply means companies can incur heavy fines and suffer significant reputational damage; data from HM Treasury7 shows that the total value of fines levied by the various UK supervisory bodies for non-compliance jumped from £109m in 2020-21 to £504m in 2021-22.

Together, the tools offered by AccessPay’s Fraud & Error Prevention Suite help businesses to streamline processes, mitigate key risks and improve regulatory compliance. With new risks emerging all the time, AccessPay will continue to add new features to the Fraud & Error Prevention Suite to help protect against potential losses, legal liabilities, and reputational damage.