Founded: 2016

Products: Confirmation of Payee (IBAN-Name Check) for banks and organisations, SurePay PayID/Pay to Mobile, Switch Check

Overview: Confirmation of Payee (CoP) provides customers with real-time feedback on the correctness of entered beneficiary details when making a payment before they make a final decision to proceed. The main purpose is simple: to eradicate misdirected payments either because of fraud (typically authorised push payment, or APP, fraud) or simply the innocent entering of erroneous information (‘fat-finger syndrome’).

SurePay CoP matching algorithm combines data science techniques with knowledge of transactions and payer behaviour. This helps prevent fraud and mistakes, while facilitating straight-through processing.

SurePay has performed more than 3.5 billion checks since it went live. In the Netherlands, it checks 99.4% of all payments. This has led to an 81% drop in fraud through Dutch IBANs, and 67% fewer misdirected payments. CoP checks are performed in under a second and SurePay has a system availability of 99.98%. In the UK, SurePay is now checking more than 25% of all UK online payments, currently in collaboration with NatWest Group and Atom Bank.

For corporate customers, SurePay provides a more sophisticated version of its CoP solution. This service is available via an application programming interface (API) providing direct corporate access and is used in the know your customer (KYC) onboarding process, in claims and payout actions, in direct debit processes and in fraud investigations.

Clients: More than 30 banks and at least 150 organisations

Active region(s): UK, NL, rest of Europe

Partners: 30 banks, e.g. NatWest Group, Atom Bank, Rabobank, ING, ABN AMRO and partners including Signicat. Amazon Web Services for cloud and Mobiquity as Team-as-a-Service provider.

Employees: 70, based in the Netherlands (HQ), UK and Germany. Growing to 100 in 2021

Funding: N/a

Ownership: Private company and an independent part of the Rabobank Group.

Elevator pitch: “As fraudsters become more sophisticated, new payments solutions are needed to protect businesses and consumers. Confirmation of Payee (CoP) technology is devised to safeguard banking customers against authorised push payment (APP) scams. SurePay is the inventor and the market leader in CoP in the UK and the Netherlands. After four years improving our algorithm, tweaking, and improving the service, SurePay is now scaling across the European Union and beyond. Having performed more than 3.5 billion checks, SurePay has prevented huge losses to fraud and misdirection for our partners and their customers.”

Website: www.surepaytechnologies.co.uk

Email: [email protected]

TMI view: Pre-validating account details before sending a payment request is such a simple idea, not just to help limit fraud but also to prevent mistakes. Here’s a solution that does just that in almost real time. For corporates, it tackles the KYC element too. Simple and highly effective.      

Verdict: There’s a case for a solution like this to be a standard offering on all account activities.