We are aiming to go live in early February 2024. On the day, we'll provide a pop-up notification in Internet Banking to let all users know that Confirmation of Payee is live. We'll also remind bulk payment users to start using the new Bulk Payment Template.
Changes to bulk payments
What's changing?
Our online payment system will be soon upgraded to include Confirmation of Payee, which is an account name checking service. It's designed to help reduce misdirected payments and ensure UK payments are being sent to the right account. This will have an impact on how you upload bulk payments through Internet Banking.
How will it impact me?
Changes will impact existing bulk payment users in 2 ways:
- There will be a new Bulk Payment Template which includes an extra column for the user to confirm if each payee is a person or a business. This is a required field, and any older style template won't be able to be used.
- At each upload, all payees will be checked to confirm if they are new or existing. All new payees will go through the Confirmation of Payee process, which may require extra decisions being completed for each new payee.
What can I do to be ready?
If you currently have your own IT process that uploads your payment data into our Bulk Payment Template, you'll need to make some changes. This includes adding the extra column. To help you with this, please take a look at our example template - New Bulk Payments Template (xls). Remember, you can continue to use your existing template until we let you know Confirmation of Payee is live.
Once Confirmation of Payee is live, your bulk payment request might take longer to complete at first as all new payees will need to be confirmed. For example, if you are paying 10 new payees, you will need to confirm these during the setup process. However, when you pay those 10 payees again, as they'll already be confirmed, it won't take as long. Whilst this will take more time at the start, you'll have greater assurance that the payments you are sending are going to the right account holders.
Frequently Asked Questions
The system will not allow this, and you'll receive an error message to advise the document is not recognised.
Yes, all approvers will be able to view the result for each new payee as well as the action taken by the inputter of the payment upload.
No, Confirmation of Payee can't be switched off when creating new payees within Internet Banking.
We'll be adding further details about Confirmation of Payee on our website soon. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more, please visit PayUK.