The European Payments Council is seeking Directory Service Providers to help with checking routing algorithms that may be used by Verification of Payee (VoP) scheme participants.
Payment service providers will have to offer VoP IBAN/name matching services to their customers for their Sepa transactions from October.
As part of the scheme, the EPC contracted Swift to develop the EPC Directory Service (EDS), a centralised platform storing all EPC scheme participants’ information needed to securely identify and authorise them, and to secure reachability and interoperability at the VoP scheme level.
Now the Council is issuing a public 'call for interest' to Directory Service Providers that own directories of BICs, official national identifiers and/or IBAN ranges, and allowing retrieval of BICs from customer account numbers.
These providers are being invited to collaborate with the EPC with the goal of checking routing algorithms that may be used by VoP scheme participants when issuing VOP Requests.
The EPC wants to work with them to verify the availability of the required dataset (Account Holding BICs) to support correct configuration of the EDS in line with EPC specifications, and to test options for implementing the IBAN-to-BIC mapping algorithm.
Interested parties have until 18 July to respond via email.