Open Payments has added Verification of Payee (VoP) directly into its API through a partnership with Movitz Payments, making the Open Payments VoP integration available to customers connecting ERPs, accounting platforms, treasury systems, and other business applications to banking infrastructure.
The claim is straightforward: before a payment is executed, the recipient’s account details can be checked against the intended payee. The verification step sits inside the same API that customers already use for payment initiation and account information, meaning no separate integration is required. Open Payments says this allows businesses to catch potential errors or fraudulent payment attempts earlier in the process, at the point where the payment is being created and approved, rather than after the money has moved.
What the Open Payments VoP integration actually does
Open Payments provides a unified banking API that connects ERPs, accounting systems, and treasury platforms to multiple banks. The VoP capability itself is powered by Movitz Payments’ payee verification technology, slotted into that existing infrastructure. The practical effect, as the company describes it, is that payee verification becomes part of the embedded payment experience customers already have, rather than a bolt-on requiring additional maintenance.
Rasmus Brenter, chief product officer and deputy chief executive officer at Open Payments, framed it this way: ‘Security has always been a fundamental part of how we build and deliver payment infrastructure at Open Payments. Integrating Verification of Payee directly into our API is a natural next step. It allows our customers to add another layer of protection to their payment flows without introducing separate integrations or additional complexity for their users.’
Magnus Hedenberg, chief executive officer and co-founder of Movitz Payments, made the case for why verification needs to sit closer to the payment’s origin: ‘Business payments are increasingly initiated from the systems where companies already manage their invoices, suppliers, and cash flow. That creates huge efficiency gains, but it also means fraud prevention needs to move closer to the point where the payment is created. Together with Open Payments, we can help make those payment flows safer without making them more complicated.’
Both statements track the same logic: as payment initiation migrates away from traditional online banking and into business software, the security layer needs to migrate with it. The argument is reasonable, though Open Payments does not publish fraud data from its existing customer base to quantify the improvement the integration delivers. That would be the next useful thing to see.
The regulatory context around VoP
The partnership arrives against a backdrop of mandatory change across European payments. According to Experian, the VoP scheme was introduced in October 2024 in response to the Instant Payment Regulation (IPR), and approximately 3,000 European Payment Services Providers (PSPs) must implement VoP by 5 October 2025. That deadline gives the regulatory pressure a concrete shape: this is not an optional feature that providers can defer indefinitely.
For ERP providers and accounting platforms already building or maintaining banking integrations, the prospect of adding a separate verification layer on top of existing connections is a real cost and complexity concern. Open Payments’ proposition is that the Open Payments VoP integration sidesteps that problem, because verification is available through the same connection they are already using. Whether that proves compelling in practice will partly depend on how broadly Open Payments’ API is already deployed across a given customer’s banking relationships.
The partnership does not appear to restrict the capability to a particular geography or bank subset, though Open Payments has not published a list of which banks within its network support the VoP check end to end. That is a detail worth pressing before committing to the integration as a complete fraud-prevention solution.
With the October 2025 compliance deadline for PSPs now close, providers weighing their VoP implementation options will need to move quickly. Open Payments has positioned this as a ready-made route that avoids building from scratch.
