The European Payments Council (EPC) has released version 2.0 of its recommendations on matching processes, a move intended to curb avoidable No Match and Close Match results that risk slowing payment initiation across Europe.

The revised guidance follows the 2026 change management cycle for the VOP scheme rulebook, along with a public consultation on its contents. A central addition concerns the character sets permitted in VOP requests and responses.

As a general rule, API messages exchanged between payment service providers (PSPs) are expected to rely on the limited Latin character set, carried via UTF-8 encoding.

The document goes further by setting out how PSPs and Routing and/or Verification Mechanisms (RVMs) ought to handle character conversion, as well as how they should treat messages that include characters falling outside the permitted set. Parties may adopt alternative approaches, provided these have been agreed between them by contract.

Beyond character handling, the recommendations describe how a Responding PSP can prepare payee names and compare them in order to decide whether a verification check returns a Match, a Close Match or a No Match. The guidance addresses both natural persons and legal persons.

It considers scenarios such as spelling discrepancies, letters appearing in the wrong order, the use of initials, names that sound alike, trading names and widely recognised abbreviations.

The EPC’s objective is to encourage uniform and user-friendly adoption of the VOP scheme throughout the market. By narrowing the circumstances in which a mismatch is flagged unnecessarily, the guidance seeks to remove obstacles that could otherwise disrupt payment initiation.

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