Payee name checks make the bank mandate part of the entity record

A match passes without comment. Where the names almost match, the regulation requires the payer's provider to show the payer the name actually associated with the account, so a payer sees the difference between what they hold and what the bank holds. Where there is no match, the payer is told and may still authorise the payment, having been warned.

That last outcome is the one most often misread. Verification is not an approval gate, and a no-match does not block a transfer. It moves a decision to the payer, in the moment, usually to whoever is releasing a payment run and never to the person who owns the entity record. The cost of a stale name is therefore paid at the worst time: at the point of payment, by someone without the register in front of them.

Most companies carry several true names at once. There is the registered name in the companies register, the name a bank captured when the account opened, the name printed on invoices, the trading name a portfolio business still uses and, after a conversion or migration, the name the entity held before its legal form changed. A group of eighty entities holds hundreds of these strings, and no one has ever had a reason to reconcile them.

Cross-border structures make it worse. Legal-form suffixes are abbreviated inconsistently, accented characters survive in one system and not another, and branches are paid under a name that differs from the head office's registered name. Until October 2025 that drift was invisible. Now every euro payment into the group is a test of it, run by a counterparty, with the answer shown to that counterparty.

What fixes it is one authoritative record per entity, saying: this is the registered name and the register it comes from, this is the name held on each bank account, and these are the people authorised to operate that account. Where the first two differ, the difference is recorded and explained, because a legitimate difference and an error look identical to a bank. Reviews belong at two points. The first is any change to the entity itself: a rename, a conversion of legal form, a migration or a merger, each of which leaves an old name sitting in a bank's records. The second is any change to a mandate: a signatory leaving, a new account opening, a bank being added. Groups that send payment runs should also know whether their provider has given them the opt-out available to payment service users other than consumers when orders are submitted as a package, because taking it moves the accuracy burden squarely back onto the payer's own data.

A bank account here is a record attached to the entity that owns it, alongside the entity's registered particulars, its officers, its documents and its ownership. The account name, the account identifier and the authorised signatories are held together, so the question "which name does this bank hold for this company, and who may operate the account" has one answer.

Because officers and mandates are connected, a signatory change is visible everywhere it applies, in one place. The periodic review sits with the other dated obligations, the mandate itself sits with the documents, and the audit trail records who changed a name and when. Alethia neither talks to banks nor moves money. What it changes is where the finance team looks when a payment comes back queried: one record, with the history of every name the entity has had and the people entitled to see it.