PARTNERSHIPS Name and number: SurePay worked with an in-house team from Mobiquity on its breakthrough solution
If a letter is either incorrectly or incompletely addressed, it may well go astray; a wrong ‘address’ on a payment instruction means it may not only fail to reach the right destination, but be deliberately diverted to the wrong one. That’s because fraudsters are actively exploiting transaction weaknesses and leaping on any opportunity to harvest funds through authorised push payments (otherwise known as bank transfer scams). With the massive growth in online and mobile transfers, and the relentless quest for faster payments, the risk of a delivery error is increasing, whether malicious or accidental. Finding a solution to this problem was the inspiration behind Dutch fintech SurePay, a specialist in Confirmation of Payee (CoP), which developed a way to validate transfers by matching entered payee name with the genuine account holder’s name. If you make this vital match at the point of payment, you can be sure you are transferring money to the intended person or company, which SurePay says is
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 7
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David-Jan Janse (below) and Marcel Rienties, Co-founders of SurePay, designed a cutting-edge Confirmation of Payee solution to match account names, so payments never go astray. Mobiquity developed the IT from scratch to a sound service reducing online banking-related identity fraud by more than 80 per cent and misdirected payments by 67 per cent. As an indication of the scale of the misdirection problem, in 2019 alone it issued 53 million warnings of a mismatch between between the entered payee name and the genuine account holder’s. A spinoff from Rabobank, the multinational banking and financial services company which owns a majority stake in the company, SurePay was co-founded in 2016 by former Rabobank
staffers David-Jan Janse and Marcel Rienties, now its chief executive and chief product officer respectively. Janse describes how he joined Rabobank from university and, for 25 years, has been involved in innovation projects and ways to improve customer experience. From the very beginning of the internet revolution, he was developing online banking initiatives and mobile banking services. Then, in 2015, came the watershed moment. “Everything came together with algorithms, Cloud, application programming interfaces (APIs) and big data,” says Janse, and this was when he and Rienties realised emerging technologies could solve a growing problem. Namely, if you have to pay with an IBAN, how do you know it is correctly paired with the intended recipient? How do you ensure the payment goes to the right person or company? Their solution was IBAN-Name Check (aka Confirmation of Payee), which today is employed by all the Dutch banks and used for more than 98 per cent of online payments in the Netherlands. www.fintechf.com