The Confirmation of Payee system has reached near-universal coverage across UK payment networks, with Pay.UK confirming that 99 per cent of Faster Payments transactions are now subject to name-matching checks. The milestone, achieved in January 2026, follows a concerted regulatory push that required all payment service providers, including smaller fintechs and credit unions, to implement the service by the end of 2025. Pay.UK reported that since its initial rollout, Confirmation of Payee has prevented an estimated £870 million in misdirected payments and is credited with deterring a significant volume of APP fraud attempts.

The expansion has not been without challenges. Smaller firms reported significant integration costs, with some spending upwards of £500,000 to connect to the CoP infrastructure. The Open Banking Implementation Entity worked with Pay.UK to develop a standardised API that reduced the technical burden, but several industry participants said the timeline was aggressive. "For a 20-person fintech, the compliance cost of CoP implementation is material, and the support available was not always sufficient," said Charlotte Sheridan, chief operating officer at payments firm Modulr. Despite these difficulties, the system's effectiveness in reducing fraud has made it one of the most widely praised regulatory interventions in recent UK financial services history.

Looking ahead, Pay.UK is developing an enhanced version of the service, dubbed CoP 2.0, which will include secondary reference data matching and the ability to flag accounts that have been associated with fraud. The PSR has indicated that CoP 2.0 could become mandatory by 2027, forming part of a broader strategy to create a layered defence against authorised push payment fraud. The system's success in the UK has also attracted international interest, with the European Payments Council studying the model as a potential template for similar initiatives across the eurozone.