Verification of Payee and Request to Pay: CBI's Two New Payment Services

Quick Summary

How are Italy's banks meeting instant payments regulation and fighting payment fraud? Alessio Castelli, Head of Marketing and Sales at CBI, tells FF News host Ian Horne how CBI's Name Check verification of payee service now handles about 200 million verifications a month, and how the new Request to Pay service is landing with public administrations and corporates. CBI is a consortium company owned by 400 banks in Italy.

How did the instant payments regulation change verification of payee?

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 transfers. It also made verification of payee mandatory, so a payer can check that an IBAN matches the name of the person or business being paid.

CBI's answer is Name Check, which Castelli says is used by more than 250 banks across eight countries in Europe. Centralising the service cuts cost and effort for banks, and the check has become a core step in the payment journey for end users.

What is Name Check finding on fraud and misdirected payments?

CBI records about 200 million verifications each month. Around 70% come back as a full match and about 12% as no match. Among the close matches and no matches, Castelli says, will be fraud attempts and misdirected payments. CBI is adding services on top:

• Trade Name, which checks all the commercial names a company uses rather than a single registered name
• Bulk VOP, where CBI checks each line of a bulk payment file
• A lookout service that flags bank codes the wider financial community has marked as suspicious, even when the name matches

Next come cross-border interoperability, a risk score for payer and payee built on third-party data, and checks for more payment types.

What problem does Request to Pay solve?

Request to Pay lets a biller send a payment request that appears in the customer's internet banking. Castelli says banks keep the last-mile customer relationship and can cross-sell, while corporates gain a payment option customers rate highly. In countries with heavy adoption he cites about 85% higher customer satisfaction than traditional instruments, about 20% higher checkout conversion and about 25% higher average transaction value in e-commerce.

It is a message layer, not a new rail. The payer still chooses how to pay, including instant payments, and can pay beyond card limits.

How is Request to Pay being adopted, and what comes next?

CBI launched Request to Pay in production in 2025. The first use case was a business-to-government scheme built on Italy's centralised public administration payment system, and corporates are now asking for it to improve treasury efficiency, reconciliation and early-payment discounts. Castelli sees insurance and telecoms as strong fits because of frequent customer contact.

The main barrier is corporate fear of technical complexity, which payment service providers and system integrators can smooth. Looking ahead, he wants interoperability under the European Payments Council scheme and beyond Europe, new validated services and attachments, and support for the digital euro.

FF NEWS TAKE:

CBI's numbers show verification of payee has moved from compliance chore to product. At 200 million checks a month, the mismatches are a live fraud signal, and the services layered on top matter more than the basic match. Request to Pay is the harder sell, because the technology is simple and the problem is commercial. The uplift figures Castelli quotes come from other countries, so Italian results are the number to watch.