Overview
- An EU instant payments rule now requires banks to confirm that a recipient’s name matches the IBAN for euro-area transfers, with bank liability applying only when a full Match is returned.
- The real-time check responds with Match, Close Match or No Match, and customers can still send money after a warning, though banks typically disclaim liability in those cases.
- Customers report flagged or blocked payments, including transfers to their own accounts at other banks, often exposing old onboarding errors or differing name formats.
- Bank groups acknowledge problems handling umlauts and other special characters, while long or formatted company names and joint-account conventions frequently trigger false alerts.
- Screenshots indicate some systems reveal stored account names on Close Match, raising data-protection concerns, though large-scale data harvesting is considered unlikely due to anti-abuse controls.