I am wondering if any of our UK members have heard about this:

A work colleague told me that UK banks are going to start validation of bank account names as part of their payment processing service. Apparently they will be able to tell you if you have entered the correct account name at the time of payment not just wait for the rejection by the receiving bank. To do this banks would have to share their customer lists which would have commercial and legal implications.

Is this just a rumor or is there something to it.

It's due to start next year to prevent fraud when spoof emails arrive with the correct name, but wrong account and sort code. They will now validate against name in addition.

link text

Thanks for the quick response! Will have to do some reading.

To do this banks would have to share their customer lists which would have commercial and legal implications.

Thankfully, no, they don't.

It can be done using a validation service - essentially they get a sort code and account number (roll number for building society accounts) and the 'account name'
Account name is then validated with 3 levels of response.

Simply expressed the response will be
'Everything is fine' (close to 100% match)
'Good guess' (maybe some misspellings, Jim instead of James, half of a joint account... the BANK decides how close you got)
Rejected (they dont say what the actual name is, just that your attempt was not good enough to pass.)

Rather like trying a user password.
You will know that you got wrong, but you won't be told what the right thing should have been, or be given a list of passwords that you can store.