VOP (Verification of Payee) is the EU-wide name-versus-IBAN check that runs before an SCT Inst is submitted. The originating PSP asks the beneficiary's PSP "does IBAN X belong to a customer named Y?" and gets back match / close-match / no-match before committing the transfer. The EU Instant Payments Regulation 2024/886 mandates VOP across all SEPA PSPs from October 2025.
The protocol predates the regulation: the UK has had Confirmation of Payee (CoP) since 2020, the Netherlands has had SurePay since 2017, several other EU members ran national pilots through 2022–2024. The EBA's "SEPA VOP Scheme Rulebook" 2025 harmonises these into a single ISO 20022 acmt.024 request / acmt.025 response message family.
The customer-side UI is the surface that matters: the verification should run as the user types the IBAN, not at submission time. A close-match result ("you typed John Smyth, the IBAN belongs to John Smith") presents a confirm-or-cancel modal. A no-match result blocks submission — the user must correct the name or the IBAN before the SCT Inst can fire.
VOP is a scheme overlay, not part of the SCT Inst rail itself. PSPs without a VOP integration cannot submit SCT Inst from October 2025 — the rail will reject. UK CoP has the same hard-block semantic since 2024.
iso-compliant does not perform VOP today (the API has no access to the beneficiary's PSP directory). When a customer integrates with a VOP provider (SurePay, SWIFT's Payment Pre-validation, a national directory) the VOP call belongs at the UI layer; iso-compliant builds the pain.001 once VOP is green.