SurePay year report 2020 - tremendous growth, new services, winning CIO Innovation and Banking Tech Awards

1. SurePay 2020 in numbers

In 2020 SurePay experienced tremendous growth and introduced new solutions for banks and organisations. In February, SurePay entered the UK market with a Confirmation of Payee (CoP) solution to help customers ensure they pay to the right person and to the correct account.

The SurePay algorithm is specifically designed for Confirmation of Payee from scratch and fully operates in line with the Pay.UK requirements and specifications. Now, every day, we warn over 17,000 times about fraud and errors. In 2020 we warned 777,000 times that money was going to be transferred to a person rather than a company. In the Netherlands warnings like this led to a drop of fraud by 81%.

In addition, SurePay is playing a key part in ensuring that HMRC’s payments related to Covid-19 are delivered to the right person, working in collaboration with NatWest Group during the coronavirus crisis.

SurePay Numbers 2020 in the UK 80,000,000 Checks since live in March

Total global checks since 2017

6: Banks using SurePay CoP
4,000,000: No match warnings
99,98%: Average uptime

25%: of all online payments in the UK
350,000: Checks per day
75 ms: Average processing time

The results from these checks were:

77 Match in 2020

Highest "Matching" percentage

18 Close Match in 2020

Highest "Close Matches"

5 No Match in 2020

Lowest "No Match" percentage

Best in class Conformation of Payee

SurePay Confirmation of Payee ‘s matching algorithm combines cutting-edge data science techniques with profound knowledge of transactions and payer’s behavior to help prevent fraud and mistakes whilst facilitating Straight Through Processing. The SurePay algorithm is specifically designed for Confirmation of Payee from scratch. Every check should be accurate to avoid false positives or false negatives. It looks quite simple but it's quite complex for example Elisabeth is a match with Betty, but also we take into account initials, joint account, abbreviations, truncations, out of order and many other human inconsistencies.

2. New in 2021

According to UK.finance, in the first 6 months of 2020 there has been an increase in fraud payments with non-CoP participants, providing evidence that a wider implementation of CoP in the UK market is fundamental to reducing fraudulent and misdirected payments.

The aim for 2021 is to allow for all account holding PSPs to participate with confirmation of payee to eradicate misdirected payments. This can be either as a result of fraud (typically authorized push payment, or APP, fraud) or simply the entering of erroneous information (‘fat finger syndrome’ or outdated information).

SurePay is consistently working on their solutions and looking to the future.

2021 is going to be exciting for SurePay and here’s why:

CoP phase 2 for all account holding PSPs
Direct Corporate access
HOCA (Head Office Collection Account)
Secondary reference number
Bulk file check
Offline / periodic data provisioning upload

Do you want more information on CoP implementation?

Please contact us

3. Direct Corporate Access

For corporate customers, SurePay provides an even more sophisticated version of it’s Confirmation of Payee solution. This service is available via an API providing direct corporate access. In 2020, we saw a spectacular growth of 1719% in the number of checks compared to 2019. More than 125 corporates and government agencies now use the IBAN-Name Check/CoP Solution. They use the service in the onboarding process of new suppliers and customers (KYC), in claims and payout processes, in direct debit processes and in fraud investigations. This makes processes more efficient, safer and reduces the risk of fraud.

The results are impressive:

90% less drop-outs during onboarding
80% less fraudulent onboardings
50% less uncollectible invoices

For example, we contribute to HMRC with our Confirmation of Payee (CoP) solution to make sure that the Covid-19 payments are delivered safely, at scale and to the right people. In the Netherlands SurePay is also playing a key part in ensuring safe Covid -19 Payouts.