Paris, 23 January 2025
Joint Press Release
OP Corporate Bank pioneers VOP calls with EBA CLEARING’s FPAD functionality
The pan-European Verification of Payee solution is ready for roll-out
OP Corporate Bank and EBA CLEARING have announced today the successful completion of the first Verification of Payee (VOP) calls using the newly launched FPAD (Fraud Prevention and Anomaly Detection) VOP solution.
With these VOP calls, OP has spearheaded the roll-out of the pan-European solution nine months ahead of the October 2025 deadline for Verification of Payee set by the EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR). Many STEP2 and RT1 Participants are currently preparing to interface with the new EBA CLEARING solution in order to ensure a smooth roll-out of VOP to end users across SEPA.
EBA CLEARING’s Verification of Payee solution has been available to RT1 and STEP2 users since December 2024. It supports payment service providers (PSPs) in offering VOP services to their customers that fulfill both the requirements of the IPR and of the VOP Scheme developed by the European Payments Council.
In order to take advantage of the wide-ranging Verification of Payee capabilities of FPAD, EBA CLEARING’s VOP solution offers different options, both on the requesting and on the responding sides. This will ensure full pan-European reach from the start while allowing PSPs to adapt their VOP approaches over time. By leveraging the FPAD functionality, PSPs can also limit VOP-related friction for end users and address fraud risk considerations outside of the scope of VOP.
Hanna Äijälä, Payments Transformation Business Lead for the OP Financial Group, said:
“The roll-out of VOP is not mainly about regulatory compliance and technical implementation. It is about enhancing customer protection and trust in the new instant payments reality. Since the VOP requirements introduce additional interaction between the customer and their PSP, it is key to create the necessary awareness and a smooth customer experience around the new service. That’s why we wanted to get started early on.
Thanks to the additional FPAD capabilities provided by the EBA CLEARING solution, we can offer a trustworthy payment experience to our customers, while limiting unintended friction. The FPAD VOP API we are using complements the basic IBAN/Name verification with network-based fraud risk indicators, which makes our fraud prevention approach multi-layered and more robust.”
Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management at EBA CLEARING, said:
“We have enhanced FPAD with VOP as early as possible, so PSPs have time to ramp-up and tune their VOP integration across all their channels. This should help them to avoid a ‘big bang’ launch of VOP. It will also allow them to make sure their VOP service and overall fraud-fighting capabilities are up to speed and fit for purpose ahead of the growth of instant payment volumes that the 9 October 2025 deadline is expected to trigger.”
EBA CLEARING’s FPAD functionality was developed in 2023 with the support of fraud experts from STEP2 and RT1 Participants across Europe, following the release of a blueprint and subsequent RT1 and STEP2 user consultation in Q4 2022.
STEP2 and RT1 are pan-European retail payment systems processing SEPA Credit Transfers and Direct Debits (STEP2) and SEPA Instant Credit Transfers (RT1) respectively. Both systems are operated by EBA CLEARING, a European-owned, European-governed and European-overseen financial market infrastructure provider providing cost-effective solutions to the SEPA payments ecosystem.
About OP Corporate Bank
OP Corporate Bank plc is part of OP Financial Group. OP Financial Group is Finland’s largest financial services group, with more than two million owner-customers and over 14,000 employees. We provide a comprehensive range of banking and insurance services for personal and corporate customers.
OP Financial Group consists of OP cooperative banks, its central cooperative OP Cooperative, and the latter's subsidiaries and affiliates. Our mission is to promote the sustainable prosperity, security and wellbeing of our owner-customers and operating region. Together with our owner-customers, we have been building Finnish society and a sustainable future for 120 years now. www.op.fi
About EBA CLEARING
EBA CLEARING is a European-owned, European-governed and European-regulated provider of payment infrastructure solutions processing over 20 billion payments a year. Founded in 1998, the company is owned by 48 of the major banks operating in Europe and is based on a country-neutral governance model. The payment systems of EBA CLEARING are pan-European by design and desire: they are developed in close co-operation with the Company’s multinational user community and best-of-breed technology partners.
EBA CLEARING manages and operates the payment services EURO1, STEP1, STEP2 and RT1. Both EURO1 and STEP2 have been classified as systemically important payment systems (SIPS) by the European Central Bank. RT1, the first pan-European real-time payment system, has been processing euro instant payments complying with the European Payments Council (EPC)’s SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme since 2017.
The names of EBA CLEARING’s payment services are tradenames or registered trademarks and FPAD is also a registered trademark.