The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is set to deploy several anti-scam upgrades to its online service portals, including a new industry-first payee verification service.

Slated for a late March release, the new ‘NameCheck’ service will enable customers to verify the validity of names and account details of payments receivers, helping to avoid the possibility of a mistaken payment.

CBA said the technology will help to reduce the incidence of false billing and business email compromise scams (that is, a request made to an individual or business to pay fake invoices for products and services that were not ordered) as well as mistaken payments.

The service will be available through the CommBank app, NetBank, and CommBiz.

CBA group executive retail banking, Angus Sullivan, said the service makes use of the bank’s “unique technology and advanced algorithms” applied to recipient account name data.

Through NameCheck, customers making first-time payments can view the likelihood of a match, or indeed a potential mismatch, in name and account details.

“It also prompts them on steps they can take to help ensure they are sending their money to the correct account,” Sullivan added.

Alongside the NameCheck release, the bank has also launched a new in-app caller verification service, dubbed ‘CallerCheck’, enabling customers to verify, via their smartphone, whether the bank is genuinely contacting them via a phone call.

The functionality allows CBA staff to trigger a notification to a customer’s CommBank app, enabling them to verify that the call is indeed from the bank. The customer can then log in to their app to verify their identity, avoiding the need to provide personal information over the phone.

“Prior to CallerCheck there was no easy way for a customer to verify if they were genuinely speaking to the bank,” Sullivan said.

“CallerCheck gives customers the confidence that our call is genuine and can be confirmed in real-time in the safe and controlled environment of the CommBank app.”

Coinciding with CBA’s anti-scam upgrades, the bank also released details of its recently conducted Scams Community Survey. In it, 27 per cent of respondents said they were contacted at least six times a week by scammers, with more than one in 10 of these individuals contacted more than 10 times each week.