Why the Next Challenge in Payments Is Getting Them Right, Not Faster With Damien Dugauquier, CEO of IPID

Damien Dugauquier is the co-founder and CEO of IPID, a global network that verifies payments before the money moves. After more than a decade on the data side at SWIFT, he saw that most payment delays happen at the very end, because of bad recipient data, not between intermediaries. With Verification of Payee now mandatory in Europe, banks taking on more liability for scams, and new rails like stablecoins multiplying, we talk about what it takes to confirm a recipient’s account is real and belongs to the right person, anywhere in the world.

What We Covered

• What SWIFT’s data revealed about where payments break
• The Australian bank conversation that led to IPID
• Why IPID was built outside of SWIFT
• Verifying a German company’s supplier account in Indonesia
• Mule account databases and layered risk signals
• Verification of Payee and Confirmation of Payee as tailwinds
• How Citi Verify is powered by IPID
• What 4.5 billion accounts of reach actually means
• Passive verification versus micro deposits
• Yes, no and maybe name matches
• UK fraud data before and after Confirmation of Payee
• The US business case without a mandate
• Verifying stablecoin wallets

Key Takeaways

• Payee verification works, and fraud moves elsewhere. In the UK, misdirected payments made up half of fraud losses when Confirmation of Payee launched in 2020. By 2025 that type of fraud had fallen by 50%, while cross-border payment fraud more than doubled over the same period.
• The US case rests on economics, not regulation. Customers who are defrauded usually leave their bank, more than 5% of cross-border payments fail because of incorrect banking details, and fixing each failed cross-border payment costs a large bank more than $100.
• Verification can be passive. Unlike micro deposits or credential-based checks, IPID uses the banking details a sender already provides, pings the receiving bank, and returns a green tick or a warning with no friction for the recipient.
• A name match is just the start. IPID is layering in trust scores, mule account flags, fraud return history and currency checks, including a POC where accounts that passed the name check turned out to be linked to fraud.

About Damien Dugauquier

Damien Dugauquier is originally from Brussels and now splits his time between Singapore and New York. He spent more than 10 years at SWIFT, mostly on the data side, before co-founding IPID, which today covers around 60 countries and counts banks such as Citi, HSBC and Deutsche Bank among its customers.

Cleaned Transcript

Damien Dugauquier (00:10):
So we’re seeing indeed more and more countries that are making the banks liable essentially for fraud losses. The UK is an example, Europe is another example, Australia is another example, Singapore is also an example. And I think the reason for that is pretty simple. Victims are also voters and so they put pressure on politicians to be protected and the banks are often then taking the hit for that. So all of that is indeed increasing the need for better fraud prevention.

And it is again a tailwind for our business.

Peter Renton (00:41):
This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. My guest today is Damien Dugauquier, the co-founder and CEO of IPID, a global network that verifies payments before the money moves.

Originally from Brussels, Damien now splits his time between Singapore and New York. He spent more than a decade at Swift, mostly on the data side. There he saw that most payment delays don’t happen between intermediaries. They happen at the very end because of bad recipient data. In our conversation, we talk about why IPID was built outside of Swift and how a corporate treasurer in Germany can confirm that a supplier’s account in Indonesia is real before sending a dime.

We also cover how Verification of Payee rules in Europe and the UK have become tailwinds for the business, and what the UK data shows about fraud before and after Confirmation of Payee became law. Then we get into the very different picture here in the US, why stablecoin wallets need verification too, and why the world’s largest banks are partnering with a startup instead of building this themselves. Now, let’s get on with the show.

Peter Renton (02:20):
Welcome to the podcast, Damien.

Damien Dugauquier (02:22):
Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Peter Renton (02:23):
My pleasure. So I’d like to kick these things off with a little bit of background. Tell us like where you grew up, where you lived now, how you kind of came to be there. And I know you spent most of your career, almost all of your career before your latest venture at Swift. So just give us some of the highlights.

Damien Dugauquier (02:43):
So I come from Belgium initially, Brussels in Europe. I then moved to Singapore more than 10 years ago now. And I currently live between Singapore, between Asia and New York. So I don’t sleep much because I live a bit as a global citizen, that thing. I spent also more than 10 years at Swift. I was mostly on the data side at Swift, which means as you can imagine, Swift sits on a lot of data. So it gives me a firsthand experience on kind of where payments break, where the bottlenecks are, where the issues are in payments. So kind of like one of the things that was very prevalent and interesting from looking at the data is, whereas often we say that what’s broken in payment is the number of intermediaries. Actually, the delay in payment is not so much between the intermediaries. Most of the delay is at the end.

And it is because of data issues. So something is wrong with the recipient details, with the account itself. And so what I saw there is the industry has spent more than a decade on making payments faster, but the next challenge was really to make payments right to increase success and make payments safer for customers.

Peter Renton (03:56):
So then what was sort of the impetus that led you to the founding of your relatively new company still? So what was the specific thing you wanted to solve?

Damien Dugauquier (04:08):
I can share one moment that I will always remember. It was a discussion with a bank in Australia. You mentioned, I think, Peter, that you come from Australia and we were talking before. So one of the big banks in Australia, the global head of payments, was telling me, you know, I’ve looked at all the projects that we’ve done in cross-border payments. And the projects with the highest return on investment were not projects where we increased the speed or where we decreased the cost. It was always projects where we made customer experience better. We made it simpler, we made it safer, we increased the certainty of the payers, the senders. And so that really made me realize that’s what was still really broken in cross-border payment. And especially the one single ask from clients was help me verify that the account on the other side where we’re trying to send money to help me verify that it exists and it belongs to the right person. And so that’s why we built IPID to create a global infrastructure to pre-verify payments, essentially.

Peter Renton (05:12):
Why create this company as a separate company? Why not do this inside Swift instead of creating your own company?

Damien Dugauquier (05:19):
Every organization has its own mission. And I think as an organization, you can only be good at a few things that are aligned with your mission. So Swift’s mission is to make correspondent banking or the interbank model the dominant mode of sending money cross-border. That’s their mission. Our mission at IPID is very different. Our mission is to help banks, fintechs, and even corporates to get every payment decision right.

So to help them to verify a payment, whether that payment goes over Swift, over Visa Direct, over Wise, or even increasingly digital assets. Our mission is to verify and improve any form of payments. So the mission that we have, and the mission of Swift, were not compatible, which is why we decided to build it outside.

Peter Renton (06:11):
Understood, understood. So then just can you explain what you do exactly? And maybe you could use an example like someone who has, you know, sending money from the European Union to say Indonesia. What do you provide that makes that process better?

Damien Dugauquier (06:31):
Let’s indeed take the example then of maybe a corporate treasurer in Germany working, let’s say, with Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank happens to be one of our customers. And that corporate treasurer needs to pay a supplier, a vendor in Indonesia. What will happen is the corporate treasurer will go on the e-banking of Deutsche Bank and basically create a new recipient. They will write the name of the recipient, put the account details, the address, and so forth.

What we do for Deutsche Bank is Deutsche Bank can then send these beneficiary details to us. We, IPID, have built a global network of integration with networks, partners, banks and so forth, so that we can essentially ping the receiving bank and ask that bank, does this account exist? Is it open? Is it ready to receive a cross-border payment? And also does this account really belong to the supplier?

So we can essentially tell Deutsche Bank, and Deutsche Bank can tell the corporate treasurer, yes, this account exists. And the name of the supplier that you think that you’re paying indeed matches with the banking records of that receiving bank. So Deutsche Bank can give a green tick, essentially, to the corporate treasurer or a warning. If something is wrong, the corporate treasurer is alerted and can correct the details. Typical example is a case of invoice fraud, of business email compromise. If the corporate treasurer was tricked by a fraudster into sending money to the wrong account, we would have helped to prevent that because we can identify that the account that they’re trying to send money to actually does not belong to that supplier.

Peter Renton (08:17):
Are you also doing like AML checks or any kind of sanction screening, that sort of thing?

Damien Dugauquier (08:22):
So we’ve decided when we created the company not to build kind of me-too features. We wanted to build truly unique capabilities. Sanction screening is quite commoditized. Many people do that well. But you’re right that name checking is not enough in a way to make sure that the payment is safe. So increasingly we’re also pinging local mule account databases, for instance. So additional risk scoring capability. So we can say, yes, maybe the name is correct, but that account has been flagged for fraud. And so hence we can provide additional trust or risk signals to the banks. We’re also doing currency verification to help with FX. So we do different layers of verification.

Peter Renton (09:09):
So does that mean you’re partnering with local companies on the ground in all the different countries where you operate?

Damien Dugauquier (09:17):
That’s correct. That’s correct. So we cover today around sixty countries and we’ve built partnerships in those markets, with banks, with schemes, with fintechs, sometimes directly with the account holding institutions, so that we can ping on a real time basis all those banks.

Peter Renton (09:35):
Governments are starting to pay attention to this problem. In my research, I discovered that Europe has Verification of Payee laws. The UK has Confirmation of Payee. The US doesn’t really have a whole lot when it comes to on the regulatory side. But how much do those kind of schemes, the government kind of operations of those schemes, how are you interacting with those schemes and what impact has it had on IPID?

Damien Dugauquier (10:02):
So these are great tailwinds for us, all these regulations in a couple of dimensions. First, it means that in Europe, for instance, all the banks had to build or acquire an account validation capability for all the intra-Europe payments. And so a lot of customers have decided to use us to do then the domestic Europe validation as well as the cross-border validation. So we help all these big banks like Citi, HSBC and Deutsche Bank to do domestic and cross-border validation in those markets. Because the requirements in the UK are not the same as in Europe, not the same as, you know, in Canada they’re launching something as well. And Australia also has a Confirmation of Payee scheme. So we act as that abstraction layer for both domestic and cross-border validation. The other thing I would mention, Peter, is it’s simply about education. We’ve seen after Verification of Payee went live, that corporates started to realize the importance of name checking accounts. And now they come to us and say, I have that capability for intra-Europe payment. I also want to verify my payments to the US or to the UK. So that has really been a great tailwind for our business.

Peter Renton (11:20):
So then are you also working with large corporates or do you really is your end customer always gonna be the banks?

Damien Dugauquier (11:26):
It can be both. So we do work with some large corporates, either directly or often indirectly. So banks like Citi have a product called Citi Verify that’s public. And Citi Verify is powered largely by us, IPID, and then the corporates can consume Citi Verify through an API. So many ways to consume our capabilities essentially.

Peter Renton (11:51):
So when I was reading about your company, it says you have sixty five hundred financial institutions, four and a half billion bank accounts. Help me understand what those numbers mean. Is this the number of customers at banks or just tell me, explain to me how what your scale is at today?

Damien Dugauquier (12:10):
So we’re really a two-sided platform. On one hand, we have our customers. Customers are institutions essentially wanting to verify a recipient, mostly banks and fintechs, some corporates. And so I mentioned some of the names like Visa, Deutsche Bank, Citi, HSBC and others. Then we have the other side of the platform. The other side is essentially our data partners, our access to data. And the 4,500 institutions or eighty five percent coverage, four point five billion accounts. This is the reach of our data network, essentially. So not the number of customers, that’s the reach of the platform.

Peter Renton (12:51):
And then as you said, you’re spending a lot of time in New York. I mean, how much of your efforts today is focused on this country?

Damien Dugauquier (13:00):
So me personally, a big chunk. For the company overall, it is an important focus, but we also have really global operations. So we spend time everywhere. We’re actually present in five continents and with customers on five continents. So for me personally, the US is important because I think the problem is only getting bigger in the US and it is still very, very fragmented. So there is no single window to prepayment verification in the US.

And so what we’ve achieved globally, bringing that abstraction layer for sixty countries, we can essentially replicate that capability and the setup in the US.

Peter Renton (13:40):
So then I’m interested in sort of the friction point here because for most people, they I mean they don’t want to send it to the wrong person, but they don’t want this to be a real painful, time consuming process to do the verification of the pay. How do you kind of handle that sort of delicate balance between making sure you’re providing value and getting it right versus introducing unnecessary friction?

Damien Dugauquier (14:11):
It’s a great point that you mentioned that because the way that account validation is often understood in the US is actually including quite a lot of friction. That’s the example of a challenge deposit or a micro deposit or the Plaid kind of type of integration where you need to provide your credentials or open banking in other markets. The type of verification that we do does not require any consent or credentials being shared. So everything that we do is a passive verification. So we don’t introduce any friction to the recipient. What we do is the banking detail that in any case you need to provide for the payment to go through, we use those banking details, we send them essentially to the bank saying, is that correct? And then we bring that back as a green tick or as a warning to the sending institution.

Peter Renton (15:06):
And is that what you’re actually providing? Is it like is it a score? You said a green tick? How are you kind of providing intelligence back to the person sending the funds?

Damien Dugauquier (15:18):
So there are multiple layers in the responses that we provide or multiple green ticks, if you wish. There’ll be a green tick on the account itself. Does the account exist? Is it open? There’ll be another green tick on the name itself. And for the name, you’re right. It’s not as simple as yes, no. It’s not binary. It’s often yes, no, maybe. And if it’s a maybe, then in many markets we can even suggest a name. So if I made a typo in your name, instead of saying that’s the wrong account, then you can say did you mean Damien and so forth, which is really helpful in terms of customer experience. And then we provide additional green ticks, such as on the currency of the account, and as I was mentioning, additional risk parameters like is this account flagged in a receiving country, in the domestic mule account database of that domestic country, for instance.

Peter Renton (16:11):
So it strikes me that the intelligence you’re gathering just in your day-to-day operations kind of has somewhat of a network effect because you are gathering a database of successful payments of ones to flag and what have you. Is that part of your kind of marketing approach? Is this network effect really the how you’re positioning yourself as you’re trying to gain new clients?

Damien Dugauquier (16:38):
We are a network of networks with a central brain. What we’re not is a central database. So our clients would not want us to keep a copy of all the validations that they’ve been doing with us. So we do keep intelligence and insights, but we don’t keep PII, essentially personal information centrally. So there are definitely a lot of network effects, but it is not by building a centralized database.

Peter Renton (17:07):
Sure. Yes, yes. Let’s be very clear about that. So then I’ve noticed in my when I was doing my research, you’ve started describing IPID as a payment intelligence network, as we just talked about, and talking about better decisions before money moves, including, you know, routing and compliance signals. So is that sort of a an expansion of what you’re doing, this payment intelligence piece, or is that sort of where you’ve always been, shall we say?

Damien Dugauquier (17:38):
It is an expansion to a certain extent indeed. We started, I would say, with the basic verification, the hygiene layer of payment, which is does the account on the other side exist? And does the name match simply? But if we think about all the decisions that a bank or fintech must make before sending a payment, it goes beyond that. It is also about which currency should I send to that account?

What is the optimal path and routing for that payment? If, for instance, we can help Deutsche Bank to know that the account in Indonesia is actually not in US dollar, but in IDR, the local currency, then it helps Deutsche Bank to say, actually I can do the FX. I can earn the FX revenue and deliver IDR to that account. And so all these payment decisions are the type of answers that we want to provide to our clients. So it’s building on the same foundation verification, but then we’re building additional things on top. And maybe I can share a story. Recently we’ve done a POC with a bank and we were verifying accounts in Europe. And in Europe we are launching a new trust score capability. So we’re going beyond name checking. We’re also verifying whether we’ve seen fraud returns, for instance, on the accounts.

And so we were able to identify a couple of accounts where there was a name check, the name was a match, it was positive, it was a green tick. However, through the risk score, we could identify that these accounts had seen fraud returns. And then the bank told us, well, actually, indeed, those accounts, those payments that they made to those accounts were fraudulent. So we would have been able to tell them ahead of the payment that actually those accounts were risky and they could have ingested these data points in their fraud model, or fraud engines essentially.

Peter Renton (19:39):
So I wanna go back to the EU Verification of Payee piece because I believe it became mandatory last year. As you sort of look at the market before and since that became mandatory, what actually happens? Has it reduced fraud? Has it reduced sort of misdirected payments? And what has been the impact on banks?

Damien Dugauquier (20:02):
So maybe Europe is it’s a bit too soon to draw conclusions on the fraud side, but we can use the UK as an example. In the UK, Confirmation of Payee went live in twenty twenty. And they released a couple of months ago data points about the state of fraud in 2025. And so when we look at the before and after, we saw that in twenty twenty, fifty percent of fraud losses were essentially misdirected payments. So payments where the sender was tricked into sending money to the wrong account. So majority of fraud was that. In twenty twenty-five, that type of fraud was reduced by fifty percent. So very effective at reducing that type of fraud locally. And that was a big, big problem. The majority of fraud losses were in that payment fraud type. Another interesting finding, Peter, was that we’re seeing fraud increase elsewhere, obviously, because basically it squeezed fraud elsewhere. And one of the space where fraud really increased was cross-border payment. So cross-border payment fraud more than doubled from 2020 to 2025, which again made the need for what was built at IPID, so a universal layer for verification, domestic and cross-border. Right.

Peter Renton (21:28):
Gotcha, gotcha. The UK also, I believe it was either this year or last year where they now make banks reimburse victims of the authorized push payment fraud where it’s a scam, but the person sent the money themselves. So this wasn’t fraud per se, but a scam payment. So these banks now have liability to protect their users from these types of scams. Is that something that you’re focused on as well?

Damien Dugauquier (21:58):
So we’re seeing indeed more and more countries that are making the banks liable essentially for fraud losses. The UK is an example, Europe is another example, Australia is another example, Singapore is also an example. And I think the reason for that is pretty simple. Victims are also voters. And so they put pressure on politicians to be protected, and the banks are often then taking the hit for that. So all of that is indeed increasing the need for better fraud prevention. And it is again a tailwind for our business. What is interesting in the UK is that it’s also splitting the responsibility between the sending bank and the receiving bank. So it used to be that it was always the bank of the sender, of the victim, that had to compensate the victim. But now they’ve also introduced that model where the bank of the recipient, the bank essentially of the scammer or the bank that was holding the mule account has to share 50% of the fraud losses, which is an interesting model.

Peter Renton (23:02):
Yeah, I know it is. And it’s I think about where we are in this country. And as I said, we don’t have anything like that. And with the current administration, we’re not going to get anything like that anytime soon. Because I can see how the tailwind on your business is there when they’re mandated to stop that. But in the US where there is no such mandate, so is that a headwind, or are you finding that because this is happening in so many countries, large US banks are finding they have to play catch up?

Damien Dugauquier (23:33):
I think in the US the direction of travel is similar, but maybe indeed the enforcement is not exactly the same as it is in the UK or in Europe. But the Nacha rules, for instance, are also having provisions for payments approved under false pretenses, which is very much the same as authorized push payment fraud. And so banks have to have systems to pretend and prevent payments authorized under false pretenses.

I think even the House has published a report recently on having a more consolidated approach to prevent scams and fraud. So a bit different, but still the direction of travel is quite similar. However, you’re right that I think in the US, it’s more the demand is driven by the market. And why does the market need it? A couple of reasons. One is we see the stats globally that when a customer is victim of fraud, they typically change bank. It is rare that the customer stays with the same bank where the fraud actually happened. And so if you want to keep your customers, you need to have the right systems in place. Second, payment verification is not only about fraud, it’s also about operational efficiency. If you take cross-border payments, more than five percent of cross-border payments fail because of incorrect banking details. And fixing a failed payment for a large bank costs more than a hundred US dollars if it’s a cross-border payment because you need to reverse the FX, you need to contact your customer, contact the intermediaries and so forth. So even just for kind of market driven reasons and economics, banks still are adopting account validation. And if nothing really exists locally, it’s an opportunity for us to potentially build it or partner to build it too.

Peter Renton (25:26):
So I got to ask you about stablecoins and digital payments in general. Obviously, there’s one of the major use cases that stablecoins have proven successful in is cross-border payments. And with that, I mean, that’s obviously not using the Swift network. It’s there is still a last mile problem. But I’m curious about how you’re viewing the you know, the stablecoin kind of channel, shall we say? And how are you thinking about it?

Damien Dugauquier (25:54):
So when stablecoin really became popular in the past two, three years, it really proved I think the reason why we built IPID. So we believe that the payments world will be more and more fragmented. There’ll be more and more rails, more and more ways to send money. And what we need to build is an abstraction layer that can verify any form of receiving account, whether it’s a bank account, whether it’s a wallet, like a Venmo wallet potentially, or a digital asset and a stablecoin. So we want to verify any form of receiving account. We are actively building stablecoin wallet verification. And the concept is exactly the same. Instead of a an account number and a sort code, it’s a wallet address and the name of the recipient. And then we verify that it belongs to the right person, it’s safe to be transacted with and so forth and so forth. So that’s something that we’re actively building now.

Peter Renton (26:56):
You’re working with some of the biggest banks in the world and they have tremendous budgets for technology. Why do they need a startup like you? Why can’t they build this themselves?

Damien Dugauquier (27:10):
So to build what we have built, I think you need two skills which are not easy to combine. You need agility and you need credibility and knowledge, essentially. You need agility because you need to build all these integrations. You need to maintain it, you need to enhance it, you need to now also do stablecoin verification and so forth and so forth. So that agility is I think only a startup can bring that. But on the other hand, you also need the credibility to talk to a payment scheme, banks and so forth to expose data to us. And our background, all coming from Swift. One of our co-founders used to be the chief revenue officer of Swift. So all of that helps to bring credibility in building that network. So I think we had that unique combination that I haven’t found elsewhere.

Peter Renton (28:07):
Okay, so then last question as we kind of look into the future, so say for the next two years, what changes and what will it look like for IPID to be a success over the next two years?

Damien Dugauquier (28:23):
I think the first one is I do really believe in the mission of making every payment verifiable, which means that at the domestic level, in every market, there must be a capability to verify the receiving account and have that green tick. And so if it doesn’t exist, we do spend a lot of time with payment systems, regulators to advocate for that. I want a world where every payment can be verified, whether it’s fiat or digital. So this is one. Second, I want that verification to be as close as possible to the customers and the end users. So if it is you as a retail customer, it should be in the front end. It should be exposed to you. It should have that green tick. If you’re a corporate treasurer, actually you might not be going on the e-banking of your bank, because maybe you’re doing that in your procurement platform, your vendor onboarding platform and so forth. So I want to build the channels so that verification can be embedded upstream into the different systems that the corporates use. And that’s for us really something that we do through partnerships. And then third, it is about going beyond simple verification. So to keep staying ahead of fraudsters, because once we will have built name checking globally, fraudsters will have evolved and they will use other tactics. And so I always want to help our clients stay ahead of roadsters.

Peter Renton (29:55):
Okay. Well that’s a good place to leave it, Damien. It was really interesting learning more about your company. Best of luck and thanks for coming on the show today.

Damien Dugauquier (30:04):
Thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Peter Renton (30:12):
Damien made a good point, I think. A lot of US bankers need to hear. We don’t have a Confirmation of Payee mandate here, and we’re not likely to get one anytime soon. But he argued the business case stands on its own. Customers who get defrauded usually leave their bank, and more than 5% of cross-border payments fail because of bad account details, with each failure costing a large bank over $100 to fix.

Put those two facts together and payment verification stops looking like a compliance cost and it starts looking like customer retention and operational savings. In Europe, the regulators are pushing banks to do this. In the US, I think the economics are doing the pushing instead. Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.