UK Confirmation of Payee: Frequently Asked Questions

1. What’s happening?

We’re introducing Confirmation of Payee, a name checking service to help protect against Authorised Push Payment Scams and reduce the number of payments which are made by mistake.

When you set up a new payment or amend an existing payment, it lets you check you’re paying the right person or business so you can see if the name matches who they say they are.

Confirmation of Payee also lets a person or business sending you a payment check that your organisation’s name matches your account.

2. What are Authorised Push Payments?

Authorised Push Payments (APPs) are made when a bank or building society (also known as a payment services provider or PSP) is instructed to make a payment from a customer account to another account without using a debit or credit card.

3. How do APP scams work?

Authorised Push Payment scams (APP scams) are where you intended to send money to someone, but were tricked into sending money to someone else; or, you send money to someone for what you thought was a genuine purpose, but was actually fraudulent.

Payments related to APP scams can be made over the phone, online or in person and most are completed instantly.

We’re working closely with other Industry participants to introduce the new Confirmation of Payee service in a consistent way. This means we’ll be able to:

respond to Confirmation of Payee requests sent by other banks for payments made to our customers from 31 December 2019
request Confirmation of Payee checks from other banks for payments sent by our customers in 2020

4. What happens for payments I’m expecting?

When someone is paying you for the first time or they’re making changes to the payment instruction details, they’ll be asked to confirm if your account is a business or personal account. We’ll be asked to confirm if your account name is correct and matches the name on the payment instruction and confirm the account type is correct.

The Payment Sender will receive a response to say how closely the information matches and they’ll then be able to make a decision on whether they want to make the payment, check the details they’ve input are correct or not proceed with making the payment.

If they get a Match – they know your account is your personal or business account and have used the correct account name, they can proceed with the payment.
If they get a Partial Match – they’ve used a similar name, we will be sharing your account name back with the sender’s bank and this will be provided to that person. They can decide whether to make the payment or check with you.

If you have any concerns about name sharing, please contact your HSBC representative.

If they don’t get a Match - they should check with you before making the payment, but they can decide to proceed with the payment without checking with you.

Some exceptions:
If the Payment Sender’s bank is not registered for Confirmation of Payee, or is not quite ready to send requests to us, then they won’t see any change to their payment process and will be able to pay you as they do today.

Where the Confirmation of Payee name check isn’t available, an onscreen message will confirm that to the sender and they’ll be able to pay you as they do today.

5. What do I need to do for anyone paying my organisation?

You can help make sure that your payments are processed smoothly by checking in with your payers:

Confirm that they’re paying a business account
Confirmation of Payee is used for both personal and business accounts. You can help by telling anyone making a payment to you the account type when you give them your account details. If you’re unsure of your account type, please check with us.
Make sure payers have the correct account details
The name we hold on your account might not be the name the person is inputting – for example they may be know you as 'Bob my builder' but your business account is 'Bob the Builder Limited'. If you’re not sure, you can check your account on HSBCnet or give us a call.

6. How will Confirmation of Payee affect me sending payments?

Confirmation of Payee will be coming to HSBCnet in 2020. It will be available whenever you’re setting up new GBP payments using Faster Payments or CHAPs from UK accounts. You’ll also be able to use Confirmation of Payee if you’re amending an existing beneficiary’s details in HSBCnet. You’ll see the new functionality whenever you are making these payments using online or mobile banking.

We’ll provide details about how to use Confirmation of Payee in HSBCnet at a future date.