SurePay, SEPAMail.eu and StreamMind on Thursday (Dec. 16) launched a cross-border solution for IBAN check/confirmation of payees, allowing companies and banks to confirm account information matches the intended beneficiary on cross-border payments between France and the Netherlands.
The IBAN Check, known in the U.K. as Confirmation of Payee, gives consumers, banks and companies more confidence about their payments being routed to the intended recipients, the joint announcement says.
“Since implementing our IBAN-Name Check for banks and corporates in the Netherlands in 2017, our customers have witnessed an 81% drop in reported scams and a 67% drop in misdirected payments,” said David-Jan Janse, CEO of SurePay.
“The natural next step was to make our solution available for cross-border payments, and we are very proud of our partnership with SEPAmail and StreamMind, which allows us to achieve that goal,” he said.
SEPAmail.eu offers an account check solution in France for more than 90% of bank accounts, and SurePay’s IBAN-Name Check solution checks 99.5% of all online payments in the Netherlands.
“With this partnership with SurePay and thanks to the help of StreamMind, we enter now in another dimension that is the European area to offer a real international solution to fight against IBAN fraud,” said Jacques Vanhautère, CEO of SEPAmail.eu.
“This connection between France and the Netherlands is a first great step to a cross Europe IBAN reliability solution for both French and Netherlands communities,” he said.
StreamMind set up the cross-country SEPAmail infrastructure, which will allow French and Dutch companies and banks to check that payments are going to the intended beneficiary before the transaction is initiated.
The IBAN verifications come through the account database of banks, which is intended to reduce fraud and misdirected payments while also increasing efficiency and reducing operational costs.
The partnership will connect more than 30 Dutch banks and 114 French banks.
“Our goal is to secure exchanges and transactions between organizations and humans,” said Nicolas Muhadri, CEO of StreamMind, in the joint announcement. “We believe this partnership is a step forward in international development to fight payment fraud. We know this is only the beginning.”
Related: The European Payments Initiative: Laying the Infrastructure for Europe’s Super Payments App
Meanwhile, across Europe’s 44 countries, dozens of languages and myriad ways to pay, the complicated cross-border, cross-functional infrastructure could eventually give rise to a “super app.”
Martina Weimert, CEO of the EPI Interim Company, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in September that digital wallets, instant payments and buy now, pay later (BNPL) options would co-exist in a unified fashion across borders.
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