Best Confirmation of Payee Tool: Guide to Reducing APP Fraud

If you’ve noticed an uptick in APP fraud and are evaluating how to detect and prevent it from affecting your customers, you’re in the right place. This buyer’s guide covers everything you should evaluate to find the best Confirmation of Payee tool for your organisation.

Confirmation of Payee is the first step in fraud prevention, but it’s not exhaustive. Validating account details is a crucial step in blocking APP fraudsters, but attackers can still bypass these checks. Tools like Trustpair exist to perform Confirmation of Payee alongside extra validation checks to protect businesses more comprehensively. 

How does Payee Confirmation Work? 

Confirmation of Payee tools works through the automatic matching of an account name to the bank’s account records. Major UK banks and building societies offer real-time CoP checks, and CoP was introduced in the UK in June 2020.

Essentially, a user inputs the recipient’s details and receives one of four possible responses to signal whether the name given actually matches the name on the account. Typically, this process happens within seconds to ensure that the payment process isn’t affected by too much friction, ensuring there is little drop off for genuine payments. 

The four potential responses are as follows: 

1. It’s a match: great, proceed with the payment as planned, there is very low risk of APP fraud
2. It’s a close match: the details partially match, but not exactly – there is a risk of APP fraud. Sometimes this could be because an individual has a nickname, or a business trades under a different name than they are registered with. Some banks will suggest the changes to make based on the account details, but we recommend that you always reconfirm the details with the recipient. 
3. It’s not a match: the details you’ve input don’t match the account information – the risk of APP fraud is higher. We recommend contacting the individual or business you intend to pay to explain this and have them reconfirm the details.
4. Unavailable: in some cases, the recipient’s bank won’t support Confirmation of Payee, and it therefore won’t be possible to validate the details through this method.

What Features Should You Evaluate In The Best Confirmation Of Payee Tool?

CoP processed over 70 million checks monthly by July 2025. But when comparing Confirmation of Payee tools, certain features will matter more than others, even between similar companies. 

Here are some the features to think about when it comes to the best Confirmation of Payee tools: 

• Matching accuracy and close match handling
• API reliability and data latency
• Audit logging and regulatory compliance
• ERP integrations, support and onboarding time
• Fraud detection and reduction capabilities

Matching And Close Match Handling

One of the more obvious features of an account confirmation tool is accuracy in preventing APP scams. In practice, this means evaluating:

1. What percentage of the time it can find an account name 
2. What percentage of the time that account name is correct 

And while providers can provide arbitrary numbers, you should always perform a sample set to confirm the recall and precision figures yourself. During this testing, data scientists should offer up a wide range of common name variants to test fuzzy matching, and be able to verify the rules that trigger a close match response. Each provider may set their thresholds to slightly different coverage rates (known as tunability), which will matter when it comes to both recall and accuracy. 

While measuring false positive rates is common, you should also assess false negative rates: what percentage of the time is a true match unconfirmed, and what percentage of the time is a false match missed? 

API Uptime And Latency 

The next consideration is how reliable the API connection is, and how ‘real-time’ the data is transferred. 

One of the biggest points of contention with Confirmation of Payee is that firms fear the loading time for checks, and that buffering or delays will lead to payment drop-off. With many payment firms making their money based on the volume of payments sent, this represents a significant risk to revenue. 

Any new vendor agreement should have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as part of the contract, but regular reliability testing will ensure your suppliers meet these expectations. And when it comes to latency, it’s important for teams to really understand what is possible, and what the difference between milliseconds can feel like on the customer end. 

In both cases: be weary of unrealistic claims and always verify these claims with your own tests. 

Audit logging and regulatory compliance

One of the primary use cases for introducing Confirmation of Payee could be due to regulatory pressure, with the FCA and EU’s Verification of Payee both directing payment providers to comply. Verification of Payee (VoP) was rolled out across Europe to meet regulation requirements by 2025.

If this is a consideration, then determining the responsibility level of the provider will also be key. The Digital Operational Resilience Act and the recent Material Third Parties Arrangements mean that many enterprises will have to adapt their approach to third party risk management.  

One of the ways to manage compliance will be in integrating audit logs into your information archive. You’ll need to check that you can follow the data behind why each of the four possible responses are given, and that you can maintain full explainability if the regulators come knocking. 

ERP integration, support and onboarding time

The next consideration for a Confirmation of Payee tool is whether it can integrate with your existing workflows, and how easy it is to get to grips with the tools. A recent comparison between Trustpair and several other tools showed that only two of them supported ERP integration, with most systems taking weeks to set up properly. 

This information has been taken directly from the MonitorAI comparison: 

Tool	Clearbank	Monitorpay.AI	SurePay	Modular	Bottomline	Trustpair
ERP integration supported	❌	❌	❌	❌	Limited	✅ (Sap, Oracle and more)
Typical integration time	Weeks – months	Under 1 day	Approx 4 weeks	Weeks	Weeks	24 hours

 Firms should also:

• validate API endpoints for making payments
• ensure sandbox supports end-to-end testing
• check SDKs for mobile authorised push payment app use

Fraud Detection And Fraud Reduction Capabilities

One of the other driving forces behind implementing Confirmation of Payee is also to reduce the risk of automated push payment (APP) fraud. If this is a key part of your decision-making, then you should evaluate providers based on: 

• Whether they require fallback checks for suspicious payees, and what these are
• How they integrate CoP with transaction monitoring systems to provide a comprehensive view of real-time behaviour
• If they enable user risk scoring outputs, and whether these thresholds are set or can be customised by your fraud, risk and compliance teams

If fraud detection and reduction matters the most, you should also evaluate how easy it is to design a challenge screen for close match warnings. Confirmation of Payee tools may provide the data, but ultimately, you’ll be responsible for providing a clear action when there is a ‘no match’ response, and retaining final consent after a user moves forward with a close match. 

Similarly, CoP only checks account name, number, and sort code for accuracy, not transaction legitimacy. While it is mandatory for many businesses to use CoP services in the UK, it’s not the most foolproof way to prevent fraud.

Therefore, consider investing into a comprehensive fraud prevention platform to keep your payments safe, such as Trustpair.

Need a Comparison Checklist For Choosing The Best Confirmation Of Payee Tool?

Print or download this table and fill in the gaps to get a clear idea on which Confirmation of Payee tool is best for you: 

Feature	Tool name:	Tool name:	Tool name:	Tool name:
Match rate for exact matches (%)
Match rate for close match outcomes (%)
API uptime (%)
Average response latency
Support for bulk checks
Support for single checks
Pricing per check
Vendor integration with Pay.UK?
Vendor support for EU VoP networks?
Monthly CoP check volumes
Close match escalation outcomes
Update regularity based on false positive trends

Finding the best Confirmation of Payee tool for your business

For payment service providers, preventing authorised push payment scams is a key concern. Confirmation of Payee is an account name checking service that matches bank account details to verified records, preventing payments being sent to the wrong account. But it’s not comprehensive against payment fraud, which is where platforms like Trustpair can provide greater payment security.