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The global inter-banking system has been selected to build the Confirmation of Payee (CoP) system in Australia.
Swift has announced it has been selected to build the CoP scheme in Australia.
The Brussels-based organisation, which built and runs the National Payments Plan (NPP), was chosen by Australian Payments Plus (AP+) and, going forward, the service will be delivered via the NPP, standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) and a centralised account matching service that AP+ will manage.
Features of the new service will be progressively built and tested in 2024, allowing financial institutions to integrate it into their banking channels starting 2025.
“We are delighted to be working with AP+ and NPP participants to develop this important new service for Australian consumers,” Suresh Rajalingam, head of Oceania at Swift, said.
“Making payments safe, instant and frictionless is at the heart of everything we do at Swift, and we are committed to supporting the Australian financial industry in its fight against scammers.”
Meanwhile, Adrian Lovney, chief payment and schemes officer at AP+, also welcomed the announcement, saying that the development of an industry-wide CoP service will play an important role in reducing certain types of scams resulting in misdirection of a payment to the wrong account, as well as help avoid mistaken payments being made to incorrect account numbers.
“AP+ is committed to working with the industry to better protect consumers and businesses as part of a collective effort to combat fraud and scams,” he said. “Swift was the logical choice to partner with us in developing this important service, building on the strong partnership that we have had in place for a number of years. “
CoP is becoming an increasingly used product to counteract authorised push payment fraud, for which numbers have rapidly risen across the world.
Since launching in the UK in 2020, more than 100 organisations have already implemented CoP, and the Payment System Regulator (PSR) further has a mandate for almost 400 organisations to join CoP this year.
In the EU, the Instant Payment Regulation (IPR) entered the Official Journal earlier this week, and dictates that all payment service providers (PSPs) who offer an instant payment service will need to provide users with a service checking that the payee’s IBAN matches the payee’s name and notifying the user of any discrepancies.
Meanwhile, the EU’s Payment Services Regulation (PSR), which will eventually supersede the Payment Services Directive (PSD2), includes a requirement for PSPs offering any credit transfer in any EU currency to provide CoP.
