Signicat and SurePay team up to fight “payee confusion and fraud”

Norwegian Digital Identity player Signicat will work with payment information services provider SurePay to integrate SurePay’s bank account verification service with the former’s Digital Identity Platform.

The idea: empower financial institutions and businesses in the Netherlands to cross-check any prospective payee’s Digital Identity with their bank account details, and if they don’t match, the person or business paying can be immediately warned of discrepancies in real-time to avert misdirected payments, as well as reduce bank and identity fraud.

The claim is that Signicat and SurePay’s customers will now receive a confirmation of payee service that categorises the beneficiary’s details into “match”, “close match” and “no match” for private accounts at the pre-payment stage. 

In case of minor spelling mistakes for private accounts, SurePay finds the closest match and suggests the known registered account holder, speeding up the digital verification process for creditors and debtors, while for business accounts, the right name of the account holder is found.

Additionally, say the new partners, the check notifies customers if there are multiple accountholders involved or if the account is closed. The Account Check is therefore efficient in delivering payments for businesses and benefits end-users in reducing misdirected payments and subsequent-related financial penalties.

“Building trust between businesses and customers online is critical in the digital age,” said Gunnar Nordseth, CEO of Signicat. 

“By verifying account holders at the point of payment, bank and identity fraud diminishes by 72% in online banking,” pointed out SurePay’s co-founder, Marcel Rienties, as well as a 90% decrease in of failure in the onboarding process of new customers.

“By integrating the check in at the payee on-boarding stage, both customers and suppliers have found it to prevent dropouts for second line investigation,” he added.