Calling a verification endpoint is easy. The genuine engineering challenge of Verification of Payee is reach: to verify any payee, you need a path to that payee's bank to ask 'does this name match this IBAN?'. There are thousands of banks across SEPA — and that's where naive approaches fall apart.
The bank-by-bank trap
In theory you could integrate directly with each responding institution. In practice, that's an integration per bank, each with its own onboarding, formats and maintenance — an N-integration problem that never finishes, because banks join, change and leave the scheme over time.
Coverage is the product
A VoP integration that only reaches some banks returns 'not applicable' for the rest — which isn't real coverage. Breadth of reach across SEPA is what makes the check actually useful.
Why one connection wins
Connecting once to a provider that already operates on the SEPA VoP scheme turns the N-integration problem into a single integration. The provider maintains scheme connectivity and reach; you maintain one REST contract. New responding banks become available without work on your side.
What to look for
- Reach across the SEPA VoP scheme, not a handful of banks.
- Standardised outcomes and scheme codes, so your logic is stable.
- One authenticated REST API plus a dashboard for non-developers.
RoxPay operates on established European open-banking infrastructure, so a single connection reaches payee verification across SEPA, returning standardised outcomes with the responding BIC — no per-bank integrations to build or maintain.