Experian, the global information services company, today announced that it is the first commercial provider of bank account validation products to be awarded a 'Sort Code Validation Accreditation' by the Payments Council in the UK.
The accreditation, which covers sort code validation, bank account checking, and validation of building society roll or reference numbers, applies to Experian's Bank Wizard software, which improves Straight-Through-Processing of UK and international payments.
The Sort Code Validation Accreditation is a voluntary scheme which has arisen from industry initiatives to improve the distribution of Bank Reference Data - specifically the desire to provide assurance that the sort code information within the UK payments industry is accurate and up-to-date. Experian has been awarded the accreditation as Bank Wizard meets the Payments Council's best practice criteria for data validation.
Experian Payments consistently maintains its sort code data to a high standard using a number of sources including the standard published data, through its strong relationships with the UK's banks. Its dedicated data team identifies and confirms changes to bank data on a weekly basis, meaning that updates can be incorporated automatically into customers' systems to ensure that they benefit from working with the most accurate and up-to-date information available in order to make automated payments via Bacs, Faster Payments or CHAPS.
Hilary Plattern, Director of Strategy at the Payments Council, said: "Businesses, including retailers, which use an accredited provider can be confident that not only are they using up-to-date sort code information but that their supplier has met the Payments Council's accreditation scheme requirements which set out best practice."
Jonathan Williams, Director of Strategic Development at Experian Payments, added: "We fully support the Payment Council's drive to ensure operational efficiency, and are proud to be the first provider to be awarded this accreditation as it underlines our efforts to ensure that our customers can make and receive electronic payments smoothly. Through our validation tools we help our customers to minimise processing errors and delays, and remove the problem of managing updates to complex and constantly changing payments data within business systems."
Bank Wizard technology is also integrated across many of Experian's validation products including Detect, Universal ID Checker, Identity IQ and Identity hub.