Verification of Payee: Why VoP Alone Won't Stop Payment Fraud

What happened

Verification of Payee (VoP) has launched across European payment networks, but fraud has not fallen — it has continued to rise. Speaking at EBAday in Copenhagen, Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management at EBA Clearing, told FinextraTV that while VoP represents a meaningful step forward, it is no silver bullet against the increasingly organised and sophisticated fraud landscape that payment service providers now face.

Kulk's central argument was direct: VoP alone cannot carry the weight of PSR compliance or fraud reduction. Payment service providers must layer collaborative, network-based tools on top of VoP — tools capable of detecting suspicious activity earlier in the transaction journey, sharing structured data across institutions, and responding in real time rather than after the fact.

Why it matters

For anyone designing payment experiences or customer-facing financial services, this is a critical signal. VoP was widely positioned as the intervention that would restore customer confidence in push payments by confirming the recipient's identity before money moves. The fact that fraud volumes have continued to climb despite its introduction reveals a deeper behavioural truth: fraudsters adapt faster than any single control can. The attack surface has shifted, not shrunk.

From a service-design perspective, this exposes the danger of treating fraud prevention as a feature rather than a system. Customers who are reassured by a VoP confirmation screen may actually become more susceptible to social-engineering tactics that exploit that very reassurance — a classic case of automation bias, where a visible check reduces the user's own vigilance. The implication for CX leaders is that trust signals must be paired with friction that is calibrated to risk, not eliminated in the name of a smooth journey.

The Renascence take

The payments industry has a recurring habit of celebrating infrastructure milestones as though they were customer outcomes. VoP is genuinely useful — but announcing it as a fraud solution before the data supports that claim sets a dangerous expectation with customers and regulators alike.

What most observers are missing is that VoP changes the information environment for customers, not the incentive environment for criminals. Fraud is a behavioural arms race, and any single verification layer will be gamed once it becomes predictable. The behavioural economics principle at work here is adaptation: bad actors treat new controls as design constraints to route around, not barriers that stop them. A customer-obsessed operator should stop asking "have we implemented the required control?" and start asking "have we made it genuinely harder for our customers to be deceived?" — which demands real-time, cross-network intelligence sharing, not just a name-match at the point of payment initiation.