On 9 October 2025, the requirement for the payer – the financial institution – to cross-verify the name and account number of the recipient before initiating a payment will become uniformly applicable in Europe (name and account number matching).
Such verification serves as an additional security feature to ensure that the payer receives an informative notice on the result of the verification of the name and account number before it carries out the payment order to mitigate the risk of fraud and errors. This process should be almost instant, and should not take more than five seconds.
The verification result will not affect the payer's right to proceed with the payment according to the details of the payee originally provided. The payer remains responsible for the decision to make or not to make the payment if there is an irregularity.
Verification of the name and account number is a process that should be completed by payment services providers before the payment is authorised by the payer. This involves verifying that the entered payee's bank account number (IBAN) matches their name or other identifiers, such as a VAT number or legal entity identifier (LEI). Verification of the name and account number should take place before each payment even in cases when the same payee is sent the payment several times or when it is repeated as a regular credit transfer, if for some reason the instant payment had been rejected. The verification of the name and account number will not be performed in cases, when the payer does not indicate the payee (for example, the account number and name of payee are extracted from a register of phone numbers and account numbers).
The introduction of the name and account number verification service will improve security and mitigate the risk of fraud by giving an additional opportunity to stop the payment in cases when fraudsters replace payment details, i.e. when they indicate the name of a payee known to the payer, but replace the account number with a number of their choice.
This requirement will apply to intrabank and traditional payments to customers of other banks, as well as to instant payments.
Latvijas Banka is one of the two euro area central banks that provides the service of verifying the payee's name against the provided payee's account number (IBAN). Moreover, as of 5 October 2025, it will also provide access to its instant verification service to interested payment service providers from other European countries. Financial institutions of Latvia are able to choose a payment verification service provider. For the list of institutions that will use the service offered by Latvijas Banka, see here.