The European Payments Council is seeking Directory Service Providers to assist in verifying routing algorithms that may be used by participants in the Verification of Payee (VoP) scheme.
As of October, payment service providers must offer VoP IBAN/name matching services for their SEPA transactions. To facilitate this, the EPC has contracted with Swift to develop the EPC Directory Service (EDS), a centralized platform that stores essential information about all EPC scheme participants for secure identification, authorization, and to ensure interoperability at the VoP schema level.
The Council is now issuing a public call for interest to Directory Service Providers that manage directories of BICs, official national identifiers, and/or IBAN ranges, enabling retrieval of BICs from customer account numbers. These providers are invited to collaborate with the EPC to validate the routing algorithms that may be utilized by VoP scheme participants when issuing VoP requests.
The EPC aims to verify the availability of necessary datasets (Account Holding BICs) to ensure correct configuration of the EDS in accordance with EPC specifications and to explore options for implementing the IBAN-to-BIC mapping algorithm. Interested parties have until July 18 to respond via email.