Vocalink and TSB: providing confidence in every payment

On 26 September 2019, we were thrilled to announce a partnership with TSB to deliver Confirmation of Payee. The service, one of the first in the UK, leverages our financial crime solution to Verify Account Name. It uses historical payments data to help financial institutions and their customers be sure payments are being made to the intended recipient, providing confidence in every payment.

We invited John Lyons, Payments Director at TSB, to join Vocalink CEO Gregor Dobbie in conversation on how the new service will benefit and protect UK people and businesses from sending money to the wrong bank account, or falling victim to authorised push payment fraud.

According to UK Finance data, there were 84,624 cases of APP fraud in the UK in 2018 with £354.3m lost to victims as a result.

In April, TSB announced a UK banking first, a Fraud Refund Guarantee, to ensure the bank’s 5.2 million customers are protected if they are an innocent victim of fraud – whether it’s unauthorised transactions on their accounts or customers tricked into authorising payments to fraudsters. Partnering with Vocalink to verify an account name when making a payment between bank accounts is a significant step in delivering on that promise.

The service also meets and exceeds the ‘Confirmation of Payee’ standards set out by Pay.UK for an industry-level initiative to combat the recent significant growth of authorised push-payment fraud and the negative impact it has on customers.

Powered by the huge volumes of payments-related data that flows through account-based payments systems, our solution performs account name and name history using multiple algorithms and fuzzy matching to return a confidence score with greater accuracy than others available in the marketplace. This supports a more positive customer experience without impacting legitimate payers, reducing friction for people when either setting up a new recurring payment, or sending a one-off payment.

Verify Account Name complements banks’ existing fraud prevention solutions, as well as other network-level solutions offered by Vocalink and Mastercard in the UK and globally.

Together, Vocalink and TSB are pioneering a new solution to combat financial crime. But it’s not necessarily the kind of innovation the end customer will ever see. As we strive to make payments safer and smarter, the technology becomes increasingly invisible but no less important — a perfect example of innovation taking place in the background.

To read the press release, visit our Newsroom