Email received from Barclays today:
Hi Customer,
What's new?
I'm sure they'll tell me...
A new service called Confirmation of Payee has been designed to help protect your payments from scams, fraudsters and payments going to the wrong account.
From March, when you pay a new person or business using Faster Payments (including standing orders) or CHAPS, we'll match their account name as well as the sort code and account number to make sure you're paying the right person. If someone makes a new payment to you, their bank may do the same.
[and so on]
Your Barclays Business Team
They appear to have learned the lesson from this debacle.
You do wonder, why on earth didn't banks always check the name of the recipient? What was the point of asking for their name if they're not going to check it?
Monday, 24 February 2020
Barclays' new "Confirmation of Payee" service.
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4 comments:
"What was the point of asking for their name if they're not going to check it?"
I suspect the name request is a hangover from the days when humans were actually involved in the process, names being much harder for a machine to check than numbers.
B, indeed. But as most payments are electronic, surely they can get their machines to check payee? It's a lot easier than ANPR, and that works.
Having worked a bit near this initiative a few years ago, the difficulty came in matching variations of the full name, is it M Wadsworth, Gerald Wadsworth, GM Wadsworth, Mark Wadsworth, Mr Wadsworth, Wadders etc.
What ThomasBHall said. Add in businesses who are often sole traders trading as ABC Builders (or whatever) and cross checking the name the payer puts in the box vs what the recipient's bank has on file is going to generate millions of false fraud markers.
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