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Six major banks in Luxembourg have selected LUXHUB’s Payee Verification Platform as their Verification of Payee (VOP) solution provider, and Routing and Verification Mechanism (RVM), with the October 9th deadline approaching. Concretely, VOP will be embedded in the customer’s payment journey, whatever the SEPA payment initiation channel. Thanks to the choice of these major banks, most Luxembourg account holders will benefit from a harmonized customer experience, being it through the retail or corporate channels. LUXHUB’s Payee Verification Platform will thus play a key role in the smooth deployment of this verification process in Luxembourg, and beyond.
One year ago, LUXHUB’s founding banks showed their official support to the company’s Verification of Payee solution, highlighting LUXHUB’s ambition to offer a mutualized and scalable solution to all Payment Service Providers (PSPs). Today and after a thorough analysis and consideration of various providers, six major banks in Luxembourg are announcing they have selected the said Payee Verification Platform in the context the VOP obligation.
This obligation, introduced in the Instant Payments Regulation (“IPR”), concerns all types of SEPA credit transfers, instant or non-instant. It is defined as the requirement for the payer’s PSP to verify, with the payee’s PSP, the received payee information, such as the name or professional identifier and conversely, for the payee’s PSP to respond to these check requests. The verification must be done immediately after the payer provides relevant information about the payee and before the payer is offered the possibility of authorizing that credit transfer. And, as mentioned in the IPR, “the payer’s PSP shall offer the service ensuring verification regardless of the payment initiation channel used by the payer to place a payment order for the credit transfer.” The VOP deadline has been set for October 9th, 2025, giving PSPs less than 7 months to implement this matching service: the countdown has definitely started.
As highlighted by Claude Meurisse, CEO of LUXHUB, “we are proud to welcome these major banks, which represent a very large share of the bank accounts in Luxembourg, on our Payee Verification Platform. It increases the network and mutualization effects and logically strengthens the platform. At the same time, we are still working on convincing other key players to join, with the overall goal of providing a robust and efficient platform that will ensure secure and verified credit transfers for payment services users (PSUs) as well as PSPs themselves”.
A mutualized platform
The LUXHUB Payee Verification Platform is composed of two specific services, or actually two sides of the same coin:
VOP Service Provision, aimed at supporting PSPs in exposing and managing, in a secure and compliant manner, a real-time name and account matching service and
VOP Unified Access, which offers payers’ PSPs a single interface to access verification service made available by the payee’s PSPs.
Opting for a mutualized platform such as the one provided by LUXHUB makes sense as it enables the creation of a wider hub, that will automatically enhance the overall service with more payment service providers and accounts directly connected. Thanks to the EPC VOP Scheme, all PSPs located in Europe will eventually be linked through a payee verification, and leveraging the services of a recognized Routing and/or Verification Mechanism that ensures the connectivity between a large number of PSPs will definitely mean a more efficient matching service.
LUXHUB’s Payee Verification Platform positions itself as a Qualified RVM, both as Responding and Requesting RVM. It therefore complies with the VOP Scheme Rulebook, the VOP API Specifications (governing the Scheme, as published and amended by the EPC), and the requirements applicable to the VOP Scheme set out in the API Security Framework.
“An Open Finance and RegTech expert, specializing in mutualization, connectivity and compliance, LUXHUB has once again proved its pioneering status by developing a powerful platform, and its matching algorithm, to help the concordance of IBANs and names.
“LUXHUB was born with one specific mission: helping financial institutions solve their regulatory challenges and provide innovative solutions, and six years later, we are still following that path with the same ambition and effectiveness”, highlights Claude Meurisse.
The next steps for PSPs
Currently, many PSPs have weighted the different options and have even selected their preferred partner to support them in this new regulatory challenge. VOP has clearly become a strategic project for them, notably because of the scale of the scope in terms of payments – theoretically all outgoing and incoming SEPA credit transfers – and because of its impact on all retail and corporate clients’ payment experience.
By starting their project as soon as possible, PSPs can kickstart legal, compliance and technical discussions, which might take a few weeks. Moreover, they can gradually rollout the system to their end customers and allow them to familiarize themselves with the new payment flow.