200 Million Payee Checks a Month: How CBI Name Check Fights Fraud

Quick Summary

What happens when a whole banking system checks the name on every payment? Alessio Castelli, Head of Marketing and Sales at CBI, tells FF News host Ian Horne that Name Check, CBI's verification of payee service, now records about 200 million verifications a month. It is used by more than 250 banks in eight countries, and CBI is adding fraud-focused services on top.

How has the instant payments regulation reshaped Italian payments?

The Instant Payments Regulation went live in October 2025 and required payment service providers to offer instant credit transfers at the same price as traditional credit transfers, with the aim of increasing account-to-account payments. It came with a second requirement: providers must offer verification of payee, which lets a payer check that an IBAN is correctly linked to the name of the payee.

Castelli says the mandatory check has changed user habits. Verification of payee is now one of the core steps in the journey for anyone making a payment.

What is Name Check finding on fraud and misdirected payments?

CBI records about 200 million verifications each month. Around 70% return a full match, which Castelli calls a good outcome for the payer, and about 12% return no match. Among the close matches and no matches there will be fraud attempts and misdirected payments. Castelli is careful to note that the figures cover verification of payee only.

Which value-added services sit on top of Name Check?

CBI is building extra layers to raise the quality of the check:

• Trade Name lets a payment provider verify all the commercial names addressed to a company, instead of one name held in the bank's own database from when the company registered
• Bulk VOP leaves CBI to unpack a bulk payment file and verify each line
• A lookout service detects bank codes flagged as suspicious by the whole financial community, so a payment can match on name and still be caught

What comes next for verification of payee?

Castelli sees two priorities. The first is coverage: the regulation covers Europe, but other countries run different verification schemes, so cross-border interoperability would help every payment actor. The second is new features, including a detailed risk score for both payer and payee built on data from third parties, which providers could use for their own purposes and offer to customers. He also expects checks to extend beyond instant and standard credit transfers to other payment instruments.

FF NEWS TAKE:

The headline number is scale, but the interesting one is the split. If about 70% of checks match, the rest is where the fraud signal and the customer friction both live. Trade Name and the lookout service are aimed at exactly that gap. Castelli offers no fraud loss figures, so the real test of Name Check is what it prevents, not what it verifies. The cross-border question is the one to watch, because fraudsters do not stop at the eurozone edge.