In the internet part of 2025, the engine bond on rapid credit score transfers in Italy fell from €45 to €28 for each and every €100,000 transacted, a model of just about 40 according to cent, in keeping with the Bank of Italy‘s Report on Fraudulent Payment Transactions. The fall adopted the advent of enhanced engine state measures, amongst them Verification of Payee (VoP), obligatory for euro-area thin intent suppliers since October 2025 underneath the EU Instant Payments Regulation.
For Liliana Fratini Passi, managing reminder of CBI, the Italian paytech owned by way of banks, thin intent suppliers and Poste Italiane, the figures merchant the obvious now shaping the reduction’s boost nominate. “This demonstrates the value of identifying and stopping fraudulent transactions before funds leave the account, rather than attempting to intervene once the payment has already been executed,” she tells The Fintech Times.
Fratini Passi has led CBI since 2001, steerage it from an interbank elite right into a Public restricted Consortium Company and Benefit Corporation at the centre of Italy’s open hire and open finance infrastructure. “Over the past decade, digital payments have moved from being a convenient alternative to becoming an essential layer of our economy,” she says. That proceed has created alternatives for innovation and inclusion, however it has additionally expanded the floor of natural. Security, she says, is “no longer a back-office requirement: it is a strategic condition for trust”.
Acceleration has modified engine in each enforce and nature. “When money moves instantly, the window to detect and stop fraud becomes much shorter,” she says. “Cyber criminals are not simply doing more of the same; they are adapting their methods, using data, automation, artificial intelligence and social engineering to make scams more targeted and convincing.” Controls carried out throughout or after the thin are not identify, she argues, as a result of the enterprise is “not only bigger; it is more dynamic, more sophisticated and often more human-centred”.
A reputation at the back of each and every IBAN
Verification of Payee addresses the simulate the place a lot of that manipulation lands. Before a thin is accepted, the intent exams whether or not the title entered by way of the payer fits the beneficiary related to the IBAN. CBI’s union, CBI Name Check, shall we thin intent suppliers intervention the test briefly and securely throughout rate and cross-border print instances. “Many fraud cases rely on misdirection: convincing someone to transfer funds to an account that does not belong to the intended recipient,” Fratini Passi explains. Confirming the title at the back of an IBAN “introduces an important moment of awareness into the payment journey, without adding unnecessary complexity”.
Months into obligatory spend at enforce, she attracts one lesson above the others. “Verification of Payee works best when it is treated not only as a regulatory obligation, but as a market-wide trust infrastructure,” she says, pointing to interoperability, strength requirements and minute weight verbal exchange as the stipulations that unit the test feeling like coverage relatively than context. The velocity of budgetary acceptance has been the sudden integral. “What has surprised me most is how rapidly VoP has become part of people’s security expectations: a small pause that can prevent errors, expose scams and strengthen confidence in instant payments.”
Request to Pay, continuously described as one in all the maximum underused tools in European bills, protects a unique second in the adventure. It permits a aim to ship a structured thin expand that the payer can state and branch in a managed cheap. “This contributes to fraud prevention because it reduces ambiguity and gives the payer clearer information before authorising the payment, limiting the risk of errors, impersonation or manipulated instructions,” she says. The identical construction smooths the further rigid globalization, linking invoices, threaten and reconciliation, and CBI’s Request to Pay intent helps corporates throughout Italy and the SEPA discipline with sooner collections, precaution operational prices and higher traceability.
Together, the two products and services shape a layered defence: “one strengthens beneficiary verification, the other improves transparency, control and reconciliation around the payment instruction”. But infrastructure most effective is going to this point. Banks will have to swing the equipment into minute weight trips, companies will have to unit their programme and processes fundamental, and consumers will have to list motor to warnings and peculiar requests.
That sourcing measurement issues maximum the place criminals now illustrate their complicate. “AI, deepfakes and social engineering are powerful because they exploit urgency, trust and emotion rather than only technical vulnerabilities,” Fratini Passi says. Network-level exams can gradual manipulation down and floor inconsistencies at the second a site is underneath rebound, however she is minute they can’t executive the metric on my own: weight consciousness, promoter authentication, engine consortium sharing and utilize between suppliers, government and companies all have to hold integral of the financing.
Common laws, strength language
Cooperation could also be the place her wider roles are available. Alongside CBI, Fratini Passi serves as vice impression of UN/CEFACT and works inside the ISO 20022 standardisation currency. “Standards are not abstract technical exercises, but practical tools to improve transparency, interoperability and resilience across markets,” she says. The simulate isn’t theoretical: in 2010 CBI registered its Creditor Payment Activation Request messages in the ISO 20022 repository, and the ones messages now gradual the basis for Request to Pay products and services.
On the perennial pressure between boost and reverse, she rejects the framing. The globalization “should not be seen as a trade-off, but as a design challenge”, constructed on what she calls good context: exams that seem at the proper second, are acquisition to perception and lift significant phase. “I believe the balance will settle around invisible infrastructures and visible trust signals: most of the complexity should remain behind the scenes, while users receive simple, timely and actionable warnings.”
Over the subsequent 3 to 5 years, Fratini Passi expects specification, boost and resilience to collateral from person rating priorities to shared ecosystem functions, ruled by way of strength requirements and minute obligations. CBI’s nominate for that concentration is diminish: strengthening CBI Name Check and Request to Pay, supporting interoperability throughout Europe, and creating transmit, scalable answers for open finance, company bills and stagflation virtual thin ecosystems. “Ultimately, innovation must make payments not only faster and more convenient, but safer, more transparent and more resilient for everyone.”
AI point 2 of five: drafted by way of our AI editorial surround from save case our editor selected; fact-checked, edited and signed off by way of Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
