Name formatting requirements

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In one sentence

Send the account holder's complete name as their bank holds it: every first name and every part of the last name for a person, the registered name for a company. Case, accents and extra spaces are ignored. A missing word, an added word or a single wrong letter is not.

Natural persons

first_name and last_name are compared with the name the holder's bank has on file. Copy them from the holder's RIB or a recent bank statement, in full: every given name, and every part of the last name the bank shows.

Leaving out a middle name, shortening a first name to its initial, or sending only one half of a compound last name is enough to lose the exact match.

Legal persons

company_name is compared with the name the bank holds for the account, which is usually the registered name rather than a trade name or a brand.

The legal form (SAS, GmbH, B.V.) may be included or left out, it makes no difference. Anything else added to the name does.

If the company has been renamed, the bank may still hold the former name, and the account may only match under that one.

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The three answers a bank can give

✅ Still a match

These differences are cleaned up before the comparison, so they change nothing:

• upper or lower case
• accents and other diacritics
• leading, trailing and repeated spaces
• the legal form of a company, in either position

⚠️ Downgraded to a close match

• a missing first name, middle name or part of the last name
• an initial in place of a full first name
• a civility title (Mr, Mrs, Dr) or any other added word
• punctuation the bank does not have, such as an added hyphen
• a single wrong, missing or extra letter

❌ No match

• a name with nothing in common with the one the bank holds, which usually means the IBAN and the holder do not belong together

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Each bank decides what counts as a match

The verification goes through the VOP (Verification of Payee) scheme, which puts the question to the holder's own bank. The scheme describes how a name should be cleaned up and compared, in the European Payments Council's Recommendations for the Matching Processes under the VOP Scheme Rulebook, but leaves each bank free to go further. The lists above therefore describe the common behaviour rather than a guarantee. In practice a bank may:

• match on the birth name, on the usage name, or on either
• be stricter or looser than its neighbours on how far a spelling may drift
• keep matching a company's former name after a rename, or stop matching it

The same name can therefore come back as a match at one bank and as a close match at another. The one input that works everywhere is the complete name, spelled as the bank has it.

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If the verification fails

1. BALV_1330, close match. Compare the name word by word with the RIB and retry. When the bank discloses it, the name it holds is returned in data.account_holder.
2. BALV_1103, no match. This is not a small deviation. Check that the IBAN and the holder belong together before retrying.

See the full list of status codes.