The Verification Of Payee (VOP) scheme developed by the European Payments Council (EPC) is based on Application Programming Interface (APIs). For enabling cross-border interoperability and reachability between VOP scheme participants, and between the Routing and/or Verification Mechanisms (RVM) and VOP scheme participants, the EPC developed the EPC Directory Service (EDS) where the scheme participants will store their reachability data (API addresses (URI)) linked to their Account Holding Business Identifier Code (BICs).
More details about the EDS, including also EDS documentation, are published here.
The European Payments Council (EPC) is launching a public ‘call for interest’ to elicit providers of Directory Services owning directories of BICs and official national identifiers (National IDs) and/or IBAN ranges, and allowing retrieval of BICs from customer account numbers (IBANs). These Directory Service Providers are invited to manifest their interest to collaborate with the EPC with the goal of checking routing algorithms that may be used by VOP scheme participants when issuing VOP Requests.
The objective is to start an open and transparent collaboration with the EPC, aiming at:
Verifying the availability in respective Directory services/products of the right dataset required by the VOP scheme (BICs of the legal entity holding customer accounts, so called “Account Holding BICs”), to be used by VOP scheme participants and RVMs to correctly configure the EDS, in line with relevant EPC specifications.
Testing available options for implementing the IBAN-to-BIC mapping algorithm, needed by VOP scheme participants and/or RVMs for correctly routing VOP Requests.
N.B. the collaboration shall and will not entail the disclosure of any commercially sensitive information nor personal and/or sensitive data as defined under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Directory Service Providers that are interested in participating in this collaboration, are kindly invited to submit their response via email to [email protected] by 18 July 2025, midnight Brussels time.
Please note that this call for interest excludes any financial counterparts and providers of Directory Services are invited to submit their response “ex gratia”.
To submit your response, please use the response form (EPC194-25), which can be downloaded below.