LHV and The Access Bank UK sign up for Bottomline’s CoP service

By Megha Bhattacharya

FinTech Bottomline has announced that that LHV and The Access Bank UK Ltd have signed up for the business’ cloud-based Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service to help combat APP fraud. Confirmation of Payee, introduced in 2020, is a fraud prevention system led by Pay.UK and operated with Open Banking, which confirms the recipient’s name matches the details held by the bank. This process is designed to address both payment errors and rising incidents of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud, where a consumer or business gets tricked into approving a payment to a fraudster’s account.

Marten Vill, Open Banking and API Product Manager at LHV, commented, “Using the latest SaaS technology to protect our customers’ money is an important differentiator for us. We wanted to make sure we joined Phase 1 of CoP to immediately eliminate the rising losses in APP fraud in the industry, which rose to £479 million in 2020. CoP will also be a valuable building block in our constantly improving set of API services that we offer to our FinTech customers.”

According to Bottomline, LHV and The Access Bank UK Ltd will now have access to Bottomline’s full CoP service for inbound and outbound payments. The new measure aims to boost defence against APP fraud for the banks’ customers. The CoP service leverages Bottomline’s API to validate the beneficiary’s name and account details against the information held on file whether sending or receiving payments, protecting the banks’ reputation as the trusted custodian of customer funds.

Bob Attwood, Head of IT and Operations at The Access Bank UK Ltd, said, “As a relationship bank, we want to make sure our customers are fully protected against the growing instances of APP fraud, whilst making it as simple as possible for our customers to send funds to us. Bottomline provides this out of the box with their CoP solution.”

Ed Adshead-Grant, General Manager, Payments at Bottomline, added, “The latest figures reported by UK Finance show that APP fraud remains stubbornly high, with a 22% increase in cases. Beyond the risk of financial losses, CoP will help banks improve their customer journey and support ongoing trust in their brand. With 95% of UK banks still introducing CoP, we believe more needs doing to encourage universal adoption to lock out the organised criminal activity and ensure deposits flow efficiently and correctly.”