“All providers of instant payments in EURO must offer the service checking the match between the account number (so called ‘IBAN’) and the name of the payment beneficiary and, before the payer authorises the transaction, warning the payer about any detected discrepancy, as it could suggest fraud.”
European Commission’s proposal to promote euro instant payments, Q&A
MATCHING NAME WITH IBAN
Matching a payee’s name with his/her IBAN should not pose a great difficulty when talking about direct matching of the name as it appears in the system and its corresponding IBAN. However, it often happens that the name needs to be scanned first, then converted into a digital form by means of OCR, and then matched to the corresponding IBAN.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a perfect and well-developed means of converting typed or written names into digital representation. However, OCR errors are not rare, especially when considering different languages (scripts), errors due to low-quality original, and so on.
E.g.: Elinor –> E1inor
Scanning and matching non-latin characters
Although many OCR systems are capable of recognizing non-Latin characters, the recognition accuracy is poorer. In addition, to be matched with a corresponding IBAN, these names need to be transliterated into English, which opens the door for spelling variations and mistakes. This is on top of possible inaccurate results of the OCR scan. All the unmatched entries will be alerted and will require manual processing to exclude fraud and/or AML breaches. This lengthy process negates the very idea of real time payments.
One of the key questions of executing Instant Payment requirements is:
Could the speed of instant payments undermine the payment service providers’ ability to ensure appropriate AML/CFT checks?
The evident answer is: NO. AML/CFT compliance is as important and all the banks and payment providers still need to adhere to strict anti-money laundering regulations.
FINCOM’s Name/IBAN service for Instant Payments ensures the accuracy of the Name that needs to be matched to a corresponding IBAN in Real Time (<200 milliseconds), supporting and enabling Instant Payments while ensuring compliance with both Instant Payment and AML/CFT requirements and guarantying frictionless customer experience.
By deploying its patented Phonetic Fingerprint technology along with proprietary mathematical, linguistic, and other algorithms, Fincom’s system matches and resolves differences for each Name-record by creating a common cross-language & cross database denominator for entries unification.
Fincom’s Name/IBAN service compares phonetic representation of names in 44 different languages in the original scripts (alphabets) or transliterated forms, resolving mistakes and spelling variations, including unstructured names.
