Experian Receives Payments Council Accreditation for Sort Code Validation
Experian, an information services company, has been 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 accreditation is a voluntary scheme that 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 Payments maintains its sort code data using a number of sources including the standard published data, through its 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, that 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.”