Failed payments due to disparity of registered account details and payment instructions are common, and these high return rates are the #1 reason for unreliable payments and customer dissatisfaction. Nium’s solution to this is Confirmation of Payee, which allows customers to easily validate bank account information to ensure accuracy and alignment with registered account holder details, contributing to lower return rates. This benefits businesses by minimizing return rates, which in turn, bring down costs of returns. By pairing Confirmation of Payee and Intelligent Routing, Nium is able to provide customers with the most reliable payments.

The Benefits

Real Time Confirmation: Confirmation of Payee harnesses a vast database of financial institutions across geographies to deliver instantaneous and accurate validations. For cases where Nium does not have such data, we will use Nium’s global payment network to do a penny drop (see below) to verify.

Global Reach: Confirmation of Payee is currently supported in 12 countries for bank accounts and we are planning to expand to 9 more countries soon.

Support for Different Payout Methods: Confirmation of Payee is able to verify accounts for the following payment methods:

1. BANK: Nium can verify if the combination of account number and routing code is valid and return the account name registered against this bank account.

2. PROXY: Nium can also verify proxy identifiers, in which users send funds real-time through Nium to a beneficiary bank account by using an identifier, like a mobile number, email address, or ID. 

Seamless Integration: Effortlessly incorporate Confirmation of Payee into existing systems and applications using our intuitive API that won't disrupt existing workflows.

How it Works

In order to verify accounts, Nium leverages a combination of information provided by clearing systems and a penny drop using its own global network to return if an account exists or not.

Clearing System Lookup: Some real-time clearing systems provide a lookup functionality where we can verify if an account number/proxy identifier exists and the corresponding account name registered against the identifier. With our 60+ partnerships across various banks and clearing systems across the globe, Nium is able to relay this information to its customers.

Penny Drop: In geographies where a clearing system does not expose the account information, Nium has devised a unique algorithm to check if there have been successful transactions in its network for the specified account number and triggers a penny transaction to the account number, if required, to ensure the accuracy of its results.

Available Countries

Status Descriptions

What's Next?

We recently launched our developer guide and API reference for Confirmation of Payee, that summarizes the customer experience and API calls that users can leverage. We are working to bring more currencies to this mix (JPY, KRW, LKR, TRY, MXN, DKK, HUF, SEK, BRL). For now, we are targeting GBP and USD.