Bottomline, a leading provider of financial technology that helps make business payments simple, smart and secure, today announced the launch of Pay.UK’s Payer Name Verification service, offered through Bottomline Payments Services Limited, which will provide businesses with greater assurance that payments are being collected from the named account holder when processing Direct Debits.

Payer Name Verification is an expansion of Pay.UK’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP) name-checking service for UK-based payments, which launched in 2020. The CoP service has been successfully implemented by over 80 UK banks, building societies and other payment service providers (PSPs).

“Payer Name Verification extends Bottomline’s longstanding, culturally solid commitment to helping businesses fight threats on all fronts to a critical piece of the crime equation for Direct Debits,” said Omri Kletter, VP, Fraud & Financial Crime, Bottomline. The new service confirms the bank account details provided belong to the named business or individual, giving companies greater confidence that the Direct Debit is being set up by the actual account holder, helping to lower the risk of an indemnity claim.

“Introducing the same real-time fraud prevention service for payers is another assertive step forward in our global fight against fraud”, stated Kletter.

Payer Name Verification is readily available for customers looking to streamline account verification within their collections processes.

As a trusted method of paying regular bills, UK Finance’s last report cited 4.6 billion Direct Debits to the value of £1,243 billion being processed. For the companies collecting those Direct Debits, Payer Name Verification helps protect against the risk of chargebacks and reduces the costs associated with manually verifying account holders to ensure compliance with the Direct Debit scheme rules.