[sc00ter]

Bank accounts and sort codes are not particularly secure - I might for example give these out to someone making a payment to me, and some businesses publish this information as a matter of course.

What additional checks do you undertake to ensure that the person using the service to make a payment is the owner of the bank account in question?

(I'm not saying Credit Cards are perfect, but they do allow for a lot of additional information to be verified to confirm the cardholder.)

[tomblomfield]

We work with the banks and a number of third-party identity-checking providers to verify that the bank details match the identify given. There's also a lot of additional stuff going on to match the person at the keyboard with the identity provided.

It's worth noting that there's a very strong consumer guarantee in case of fraud: http://www.bacs.co.uk/bacs/businesses/directdebit/collecting...