VOP User Group 7: EPC Scheme & PVP updates
On January 30th, the VOP User Group met for the first time in 2026, with the LUXHUB experts presenting the latest EPC Scheme updates, as well as the upcoming features and evolution of the Payee Verification Platform.
EPC Scheme Updates
On December 18th, the European Payments Council launched a public consultation document. It contains 13 change requests (5 changes, 5 clarifications and 3 corrections/typos). These changes revolving mainly around technical and operational requirements, security updates, etc. aim to address points identified following the October go-live. Since those affecting LUHUXB’s Payee Verification Platform were already resolved unilaterally, their future confirmation will have almost no impact on existing implementations.
This consultation will last until February 15th, 18:00 CET. The objective is to update the VOP Scheme Rulebook v1.0 and it will result in version 1.1 of the Rulebook. This new version should be published in mid-March and will be effective in mid-June 2026.
In the meantime, and from April to June 2026, a new consultation period will start, with the industry reviewing the proposed changes for v2.0. The publication of the VOP Scheme Rulebook v2.0 is expected for November 2026, the expected effective date should be around November 2027 (standard EPC practice is a one-year lead time between publication and implementation).
The Payee Verification Platform
The LUXHUB Team first shared a “first 100 days overview” of the Payee Verification Platform. On the VOP Responding side, thanks to the continuous referential data improvement/enrichment from PSPs side and incremental tweaks on the solution’s matching rules, the platform reached the 90+% positive match rate (Full match + Close match) back in December 2025, and has been constant since then.
The experts then focused on future improvements of those matching rules, and how to evolve the LUXHUB VOP matching algorithm from a product and governance perspective, while ensuring 24/7 stability as well as improving results.
The fair use of the VOP service was also one of the focuses during the session. Several measures have been and will be deployed in order to prevent certain checks performed outside of IPR context.
Moreover, the team is working on additional topics and features, namely the daily export of VOP responding activity for PSPs, new fields in matching logic, improvements on portal views, and optimizations to ease the processing of very large bulk VOP checks.
The VOP User Group then discussed the different options to tackle VOP in the context or Corporate Payments, as well as the VOP related amendments introduced in the upcoming Payment Services Regulation (PSR).
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