EBA CLEARING and OP Corporate Bank announced the successful completion of the first Verification of Payee (VOP) calls using EBA CLEARING’s newly launched FPAD (Fraud Prevention and Anomaly Detection) VOP solution, marking an early operational step toward pan-European VOP roll-out. The implementation moves OP Corporate Bank nine months ahead of the 9 October 2025 VOP deadline set by the EU Instant Payments Regulation, with other STEP2 and RT1 participants preparing to interface with the solution for broader SEPA roll-out. EBA CLEARING’s VOP service has been available to RT1 and STEP2 users since December 2024 and is intended to help payment service providers meet both the regulation’s requirements and the European Payments Council’s VOP Scheme, while using FPAD to add network-based fraud risk indicators beyond basic IBAN/name verification and to manage end-user friction. EBA CLEARING positioned the early availability of FPAD-enabled VOP as giving PSPs time to ramp up and tune multi-channel integrations ahead of the expected increase in instant payment volumes around the October 2025 deadline.