Global payments infrastructure and standards developer Swift has been selected by Australian Payments Plus (AP+) to develop its promised Confirmation of Payee system.

Announced late last year as part of the Australian banking sector’s Scam Accord, the proposed Confirmation of Payee function will enable payers to confirm the identity of a payments receiver, or ‘payee’, before a payment is made, thereby reducing the risk of a misdirected payment.

The system is designed to compare the payee’s name entered by a payer with the name associated with the payee’s account – and flag when there is a discrepancy.

Swift said the additional layer of payments protection would reduce the risk of payment fraud and provide greater confidence to payments senders.

The service will sit over Australia’s fast payments rails the New Payments Platform (NPP) – itself designed and built by Swift – using standardised APIs and a centralised account matching service that will be managed by AP+.

Swift said features of the new service will be progressively built and tested through this year, enabling financial institutions to integrate the solution into their banking channels from 2025.

Adrian Lovney, chief payment and schemes officer at AP+, said the development of the Confirmation of Payee solution would “play an important role in reducing certain types of scams resulting in misdirection of a payment to the wrong account as well as avoid mistaken payments being made to incorrect account numbers”.

He added that Swift “was the logical choice to partner with us [AP+] in developing this important service, building on the strong partnership that we have had in place for a number of years”.