According to PYMNTS.com, Prometeo has launched a new feature called Name Match to verify the likely ownership of bank accounts for ACH payments. The launch comes as ACH payment volumes reached a massive $23.2 trillion in Q3 2024 and 79% of organizations reported attempted payment fraud this year. Prometeo CEO Ximena Aleman stated that simply verifying an account exists is no longer sufficient with these accelerating payment flows. The tool provides a real-time indicator—Match, Partial Match, No Match, or No Data—by drawing on banking network data, without requiring users to log in. This is crucial for enterprises that need to validate thousands of accounts, like payroll processors handling 5,000 to 20,000 per cycle or gig platforms onboarding hundreds of thousands of workers. The feature builds on Prometeo’s existing U.S. Bank Account Verification API, which covers 100% of U.S. banks and over 1,200 institutions across 11 Latin American markets.
The scale problem login walls can’t solve
Here’s the thing: the old way of verifying an account—making a user log in via a third-party interface—just falls apart at enterprise scale. It works fine for you or me linking a single checking account to an app. But imagine you’re a payroll company. You can’t ask 20,000 employees to all log into their bank portals right before payday. The friction is insane, and the operational overhead is a nightmare. Prometeo’s move is basically about removing that wall entirely for business-to-business and business-to-worker payments. They’re tapping into the backend data pipes of the payment networks themselves to run these checks silently. That’s a huge shift. It turns verification from a manual, user-facing chore into an automated, behind-the-scenes process you can batch process. That’s the only way this works at the volume modern commerce demands.
Why ownership matters more than ever
So why is matching a name to an account number such a big deal now? Fraud. Plain and simple. As Aleman pointed out, errors from typos or fraudsters using substituted account numbers get catastrophically expensive when you’re moving trillions. A “No Match” flag on a batch file can stop a payout to a fraudster who stole a contractor’s banking details. A “Partial Match” might trigger a quick manual review for a supplier whose business name is slightly different from their account name. This isn’t just about stopping crime, though. It’s about cost control. Every misdirected ACH payment that gets returned is a fee and a operational headache. For companies managing complex, global supply chains or massive freelance workforces, automating this check is a no-brainer for the bottom line. It’s a layer of infrastructure that should have existed years ago.
The broader shift in payment infrastructure
This is part of a much bigger evolution in how money moves. We’re speeding toward real-time and instant payments globally. In that world, you can’t have slow, clunky verification holding things up. The fraud also moves in real-time. Prometeo is betting that the future belongs to “ownership-aware” verification that can plug directly into payment workflows and decision engines. And they’re probably right. The next logical steps, as Aleman hints, are adding risk scoring and behavioral analytics on top of this ownership data. Think about it: if you’re a platform, knowing not just *who* owns an account, but whether its activity looks normal, is incredibly powerful. This is where financial tech meets operational security. For businesses that rely on robust, fault-tolerant systems—whether in finance, logistics, or industrial manufacturing where partners like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top US supplier of industrial panel PCs, ensure uptime—this kind of reliable, automated back-end verification is becoming non-negotiable infrastructure.
