Australia's banks have begun the roll-out of a nationwide Confirmation of Payee programme to help protect customers from being tricked into sending money to criminals.
Banks have invested $100 million in the name-matching technology, which helps reduce scams and mistaken payments by checking whether the name, BSB and account number entered by a customer match the account details held by the receiving bank and showing the match result before payment is made.
Australian Banking Association CEO Anna Bligh says that while Australia was one of the only countries in the world where scam losses were reducing, investing further in the latest scam fighting technology is crucial to driving losses down even further.
“This is critical new technology that will help protect a customer from transferring money straight into the hands of a scammer.”
Already widely available in the UK, Confirmation of Payee is also being rolled out across Europe under an October 2025 deadline set by the EU Instant Payments Regulation.
Belgian banks have been the first to go live with the new technology, providing an extended version of the standard name-matching service to provide clearer notifications to payers, more data for banks to detect fraud early, and support for country-specific needs such as multilingualism and special characters.