Digital

ScotPayments – Confirmation of Payee has launched

March 28, 2024 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital Scotland, ScotPayments

Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager, ScotPayments.

In our last blog, we shared a progress update for ScotPayments, a new payments service being designed and built by the Digital Directorate.

Since then, we have gone live with our new feature Confirmation of Payee.

Confirmation of Payee helps users verify that they are sending payments to the right account holder. It works by performing a real time check with the bank of the account holder, verifying that the account exists and the account name and bank details provided are correct.

Confirmation of Payee is an additional feature that the ScotPayments team have developed alongside the work on our payments service. Users do not have to make payments through ScotPayments in order to use the Confirmation of Payee feature. While we are in our Private Beta phase of delivery, any public body handling and verifying UK based bank accounts can use Confirmation of Payee at no cost.

Key benefits of Confirmation of Payee are:
• Time saved by highlighting live errors rather than waiting for transaction failure
• Fraud and error reduction by minimising misdirected payments

Our Beta Partner, Independent Living Fund (ILF) Scotland have been using Confirmation of Payee since it went live and are already seeing the benefits:

“Before CoP came, when we had BACS (Bankers’ Automated Clearing System) payments rejected, we had to contact the recipient. I’ve not had any since then.”

“Before ScotPayments we had no way of checking. Payment would just bounce back. Before CoP a return would occur once a week.”

Figure 1: Confirmation of Payee checks between December 2023 and March 2024

Figure 1 shows the Confirmation of Payee checks conducted by ILF Scotland as a % by result. The ‘no match’ highlights where a payment previously would have been made and result in the payment being rejected/returned or misdirected due to the bank details being incorrect. With Confirmation of Payee, the ‘no match’ was identified before payment was submitted and staff were able to investigate and correct the details, ensuring payments were made correctly the first time round.

If you are a team or organisation in the public sector that check or input bank details and could benefit from Confirmation of Payee feature, we would love to hear from you.

To find out more, please visit https://gov.scot/scotpayments or contact ScotPayments@gov.scot.

Tags: digital public services, digital sector, digital transformation, platforms, ScotPayments

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