Missing Payment Details Hit 60% of Finance Teams: Cut Manual Reconciliation With a Dedicated IBAN

A client pays an invoice on time, yet your finance team cannot mark it as paid because the transfer reached a shared or virtual IBAN with a reference that matches nothing in the ledger. Until someone traces the payment, the invoice stays open, the client’s credit limit stays blocked and the month-end close slips. The same account structure also decides whether your client’s bank shows your company name before they pay and whether your funds stay accessible when a provider’s partner bank tightens its AML controls.

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A multi-currency business account with a dedicated IBAN in your company’s own name deals with these problems at the point where money enters the business, and the chapters below show where the savings come from.

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Key Takeaways

• On a shared or virtual IBAN, B2B payments are matched to their owner through an optional reference field, so every transfer a client sends without it turns into manual payment reconciliation.
• Since Verification of Payee became mandatory for SEPA payments, the payer sees the name registered behind your IBAN, and a provider’s name in place of yours can stall a first payment.
• Pooled structures tie your access to funds to the provider and its other clients, so a single AML check on the master account can leave every client with a frozen bank account.
• A dedicated IBAN in your company’s name identifies the payer by account number, which removes most matching work at the source and shortens the working capital cycle tied up in unallocated payments.
• When choosing a multi-currency business account for international business payments, check whose name the IBAN carries, whether each currency reaches the right balance and whether SEPA, SEPA Instant and SWIFT run through one account.

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In B2B Payments, the IBAN Now Identifies Both the Account and Its Owner

An International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is a standardised identifier that points a payment to one specific account at one specific institution in one specific country. Its check digits let banks reject most mistyped numbers before a transfer leaves the payer’s account. According to the EBA, the use of IBANs is mandated in about 60 jurisdictions, and more than 20 others recommend it.

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The scale of what runs on this identifier is considerable: in the second half of 2024 alone, euro area users made 16.2 billion credit transfers worth €108.3 trillion, according to the ECB, and each of them reached its destination through an IBAN.

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Since 9 October 2025, the IBAN also carries a name check for SEPA payments. Under the Instant Payments Regulation, every payment service provider in the EU and EEA must offer Verification of Payee (VoP). This service compares the payee name entered by the payer with the name registered against the IBAN and returns a match, close match or no match before the payer confirms the transfer. The question of whose name sits behind an IBAN has therefore moved from the back office to the payer’s screen.

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Who Needs a Dedicated IBAN and Why

A dedicated IBAN is a payment account with its own IBAN, opened in the legal name of the client company. Every euro, pound or dollar credited to it belongs to that company, and its statement is never mixed with other people’s money.

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The alternatives look identical from the outside. A shared or pooled IBAN belongs to the provider’s master account, which collects funds for many clients and separates them internally by payment reference. The EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation defines a virtual IBAN as an identifier that redirects payments to a payment account identified by a different IBAN, and the EBA notes that third parties usually cannot tell such identifiers apart from standard ones. The differences only become visible in how each type behaves:

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A dedicated IBAN matters most for businesses that receive many bank transfers from many payers and have no control over how those payers fill in the payment details. That group includes:

• B2B companies that receive international business payments from clients across Europe
• e-commerce and subscription businesses that accept transfers
• marketplaces and platforms that collect funds before paying out
• groups that centralise treasury across several legal entities
• any company whose counterparties run supplier or KYC (know your customer) checks before they pay

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The need grows with the number of payers. Danone rolled out virtual accounts for 18,000 end customers and 300 distributors in Indonesia, which gave the local business what Treasury Today described in 2022 as a robust reconciliation tool.

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What Problems a Dedicated IBAN Solves for Account Holders

A dedicated IBAN gives the account holder four practical advantages:

• Name match at the payer’s bank. Because the account is registered in the company’s own name, VoP returns a match when clients enter the name on the invoice.
• Clear ownership of funds. The EBA warns that a user who is not the master account holder may not hold a payment account under PSD2 and may therefore lack the protections that come with one.
• Automatic attribution. Every incoming payment is already in the right account, whatever the payer typed in the reference field.
• A clean audit trail. Auditors, partner banks and compliance teams see a direct link between the money and its owner.

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Shared IBANs Leave Reconciliation to Chance and Tie Your Funds to Other Clients’ AML Checks

On a pooled IBAN, the payment reference is the only thing that tells the provider which client a transfer belongs to. The SCT rulebook limits remittance information in a SEPA Credit Transfer to 140 characters and marks the field as optional. As a result, payers regularly leave it empty, shorten it or fill it with something that matches nothing in the receiving company’s ledger.

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The problem is widespread. In a 2025 survey of more than 130 companies by the Financial Education & Research Foundation, 60% of accounts receivable teams named delayed or missing remittance details as their number one pain point. At Danone Brazil, nearly half of customers were key accounts that paid by wire transfer with minimal details, often just the date and the payee name. With 350,000 such invoices a year, the treasury team frequently had to contact customers to clarify missing codes, as Treasury Today reported in 2024. Smaller firms describe the same experience in their own words: one business owner on the MYOB Community forum wrote that they could not find anywhere in the reference number which customer an online payment matched.

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The Payer Sees a Name That Is Not Yours

When an IBAN is registered to the provider’s master account, the VoP name check may not return your company name. The EBA has flagged the risk of an uneven VoP outcome for users of virtual IBANs who are not master account holders. In practice, a client who sees a mismatch warning before a first payment has every reason to pause, call your accounts team or cancel the transfer altogether.

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Your IBAN Is Refused Because of Where It Was Issued

Refusing a valid IBAN from another EU country breaches Article 9 of the SEPA Regulation, yet businesses and public bodies continue to do it:

• Scale. The Accept My IBAN initiative received 4,688 complaints between 2021 and March 2025, according to the ECC-Net.
• Business impact. In an e-Residency survey of company owners with non-Estonian IBANs, 15% of those who faced IBAN discrimination said most of their business activity stopped.
• A typical case. One respondent in the same survey, whose Estonian company held its first business account in Belgium, said a large French client saw the Belgian IBAN as a warning sign.

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A business whose IBAN is both foreign to the payer and registered under a provider’s name gives counterparties two reasons to hesitate instead of one.

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AML Reviews Can Freeze Everyone Behind the Same Account

The most serious risk of a pooled structure appears when compliance attention falls on the master account. The EBA found three problems with these structures:

• the provider of a master account may not know who the end users are;
• the information travelling with a transfer may be misleading or incomplete;
• some providers have lost licences over inadequate controls.

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In July 2026, BaFin issued a supervisory communication warning that virtual IBAN structures raise money laundering and terrorist financing risks, including in underground banking. A law-firm summary notes that such arrangements may receive more supervisory attention before the AMLR applies on 10 July 2027.

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For an ordinary business, this means its access to funds depends on the compliance record of the provider and of every other client sharing the structure. If an AML check leads a partner bank to restrict a master account, every client behind it can end up with what is effectively a frozen bank account, including clients who did nothing wrong.

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Europe has already seen how this plays out. In June 2023, the Bank of Lithuania revoked the licence of PayrNet, the EU electronic money institution of the Railsr group, citing serious breaches of anti-money laundering and sanctions rules and weak control over the intermediaries distributing its services, as Crowdfund Insider reported. Two months later, only about half of client funds had been returned: PayrNet worked through 90 agents and distributors, and data problems at some of them forced it to repeat the reconciliation of who owned which balance, the central bank said.

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A Dedicated IBAN Makes Payment Reconciliation Automatic and Frees Up Working Capital

A pooled IBAN relies on a probabilistic match based on the reference text, amount and payer name. A dedicated IBAN replaces it with a deterministic rule: if money arrives on this IBAN, it belongs to this company. The account number is a mandatory field protected by check digits, so payers cannot forget it in the way they forget a reference. The EBA lists easier payment reconciliation first among the benefits market participants see in giving each client its own account identifier.

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The difference becomes clear with a payment that arrives without a reference. On a pooled IBAN, that payment lands in the provider’s master account and waits until someone works out which client it belongs to, and until then it is missing from your own ledger. On a dedicated IBAN, the payment is already in your account, so the worst case is an internal match against open invoices rather than an investigation across a third party’s books.

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Get your dedicated named IBAN→

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Where the Time and Money Go

Manual reconciliation has a measurable cost. APQC benchmarking cited by CFO.com in May 2026 shows that top performers reconcile a single bank account in about 2.6 hours, while the median organisation needs around four hours. Manual work also produces errors: a Gartner survey of 497 controllership staff found that about 18% of accountants make financial errors at least once a day, and the errors were closely linked to concerns about low capacity. Older data point the same way: of 347 practitioners surveyed by the AFP in September 2021, 30% said they spent more than four hours a week reconciling payments.

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Every unallocated payment also stretches the working capital cycle. Until a payment is matched, the invoice looks unpaid and the client’s credit limit stays blocked. Days sales outstanding (DSO), the average number of days it takes to collect payment, also looks higher than it really is. Each day of DSO is worth roughly annual revenue divided by 365, so for a company with €20 million in annual revenue, every day that unidentified payments delay collections keeps about €55,000 of cash out of reach.

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Some companies attack the problem after the fact. Danone Brazil used robotic process automation to reconcile more than 300,000 invoices in 2023, covering 90% of invoices from key accounts. A dedicated IBAN works at the point of entry instead, so there is less to automate in the first place.

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How to Choose an International Business Account That Keeps the IBAN in Your Name

For a finance team, the practical question is which account removes reconciliation work at the source and keeps funds accessible when compliance scrutiny tightens. Four checks help answer it:

1. Whose name the IBAN is registered in. When a client’s bank runs VoP against your IBAN, the result should show your company name.
2. How several currencies are handled. A multi-currency account should route EUR, GBP, USD and other currencies to the right balance without separate accounts or extra references.
3. Which payment rails the account supports. When SEPA, SEPA Instant and SWIFT run through one account, local and cross-border clients pay into the same structure.
4. Who answers questions about your business. When a partner bank, an auditor or a new counterparty asks for information, a named contact who knows your account shortens the process.

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COLIBRIX ONE, an MFSA-authorised electronic money institution in Malta, built its multi-currency business account around these four checks. Each client receives a dedicated IBAN issued in the company’s own name, so clients’ banks confirm the name they expect and the account statement contains only that company’s money. Incoming EUR, USD, GBP, CHF and PLN arrive on the same IBAN and are routed to the right wallet automatically, which keeps attribution intact across currencies. The account sends and receives SEPA payments, SEPA Instant payments and SWIFT transfers, and because COLIBRIX ONE is a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, card acquiring can sit with the same provider, which consolidates finances across jurisdictions in one place.

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Open your multi-currency account →

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Support comes from real people around the clock, and every client has a personal manager who explains what compliance teams expect at onboarding and how to present the business, so questions are resolved before they turn into refusals.

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If invoices stay open in your ledger after clients have already paid them, the account behind your IBAN is the first place to look. Open a multi-currency business account with COLIBRIX ONE to receive a dedicated IBAN in your company’s name.