When making a payment a positive match from an account name check is not confirmation that a bank account actually belongs to a client.

With conveyancing transactions often taking months to complete, there is plenty of time for a criminal to arrange a false set of bank details that will pass a bank account name check (known as Confirmation of Payee or CoP for short) and work on supplying them to the firm prior to completion. In this whitepaper we cover:

• What Confirmation of Payee (CoP) is
• When a CoP match may be misleading
• What CoP should be used for
• The risks of CoP for conveyancers
• How the process of obtaining client bank account details can be improved
• The benefits of open banking for conveyancing firms