Exela Technologies, Inc. (“Exela”) (NASDAQ: XELA) and Co-operative Bank today announced an expansion to their existing partnership to deploy Exela’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP) platform, an account name verification service as proposed by Pay.UK.
The service provides an additional layer of security for customer transactions, ensuring that the money is sent to the intended bank account. In addition, it will complement Exela’s recently announced Request to Pay (RtP) solution, which enables consumers to electronically receive payment requests, view bills, and make real-time bill payments—all in one place.
This additional layer of verification uses sophisticated algorithms and Open Banking, which enables financial information sharing and automating payment through an Application Programming Interface (API), to check that the payer’s account name matches the ‘payee’ account details.
This service provides the payer with additional protection by detecting fraud and accidental payment errors. The solution leverages Exela Technologies’ CoP platform, which is currently processing over five million verification requests a day for hundreds of banks and is built using Exela’s modern data analytics and workflow platforms. In addition to protecting payers against fraud and errors, CoP makes the back-office payment exceptions process more efficient and improves the end-to-end customer experience.
“The security of our customers is of paramount importance to us and we’re pleased to provide our customers with further confidence when making online payments,” said Maria Cearns, Managing Director of Current Accounts and Savings, Co-operative Bank. “We will continue to focus on providing quality service for our customers and it’s great we can use innovative solutions like this to help us deliver on our customer commitments.”
Exela Technologies first partnered with the Co-operative Bank in 2017 to help it to become the first bank to fully roll-out the new Image Clearing System (ICS), which is the government sponsored digitisation of cheques initiative. The Co-operative Bank utilises Exela’s hosted ICS platform with a full suite of capture services, including branch, bulk and postal payments channels as well as exceptions processing and fraud.
“Both ICS and CoP services leverage Exela’s 40 years of experience in payments,” said Vitalie Robu, President, EMEA. “For over two decades Exela has been providing banks across EMEA with similar CoP platforms and our data scientists are now bringing their knowledge and expertise to fine-tune CoP for the UK market.”
Serving as part of Pay.UK’s ‘world-class’ New Payments Architecture (NPA) programme, CoP and RtP both function as core overlay services in the future development of the UK’s shared retail payment infrastructure. The goal of the programme is to unlock new opportunities in payments and encourage competitive innovation in the market.